> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://goodoil.news/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Remembering the Raid on Entebbe - URL: https://goodoil.news/remembering-the-raid-on-entebbe/ - Published: 2026-09-16T22:30:26.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-16T22:30:25.000Z - Description: How an extraordinary rescue raid humiliated a dictator. - Author: Guest Post - Tags: World Politics, History [**Peter Williams**](https://peterallanwilliams.substack.com/p/remembering-entebbe) *Writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines although verbalising thoughts on www.reality* [*check.radio*](http://check.radio/?ref=goodoil.news) *three days a week.* Fifty years ago, 1976, was quite the year of significant happenings. New Zealand upset the Montreal Olympics by having the All Blacks tour apartheid South Africa. Nearly 30 black African nations boycotted the games in protest. The USA celebrated its bicentennial in 1976. Two hundred years of the land of the free and home of the brave was marked with fireworks and parties across the country during the July 4th weekend – America’s 200th birthday conveniently falling on a Sunday. But when it came to international news that weekend, the American celebrations were overshadowed by events thousands of kilometres away in deepest, darkest Africa. The Raid on Entebbe, as it became known, was an audacious strike by Israeli Defence forces to rescue more than 100 hostages, most of them Jewish, who were the victims of an Air France plane hijacked by pro-Palestine activists after takeoffs from Tel Aviv and Athens en route to Paris and then diverted to this city by Lake Victoria in Uganda. We’ve been through the new Entebbe Airport twice this week. The scene of the 1976 raid is now used as a United Nations base and military airfield while the city has a modern new airport on the other side of the freeway. But that raid 50 years ago is still talked about in Uganda. Our tour driver Ivan wasn’t born when it happened but recognises the incident as a seminal moment in the country’s history. Uganda at the time was in the grip of Idi Amin’s reign of terror, which lasted most of the 1970s. As head of Uganda’s army, Amin overthrew the incumbent government of Milton Obote in 1971 and quickly cut ties with the West, opting instead to sympathise with the Soviet Union and Libya. His rise to power was originally supported by Israel but Amin changed his mind when he owed that country $18 million that he couldn’t repay. Because of his subsequent support for the Palestinian cause, Entebbe was made available for the hijacked plane to land at in 1976. Amin’s brutal dictatorship was marked by hundreds of thousands being killed on his orders. Historians estimate between 100,000 and 500,000 perished between 1971 and 1979. In particular Amin singled out the country’s Indian population, descendants of the labourers who had built the railway line to Mombasa on the Kenyan coast to export Uganda’s copper. Among those targeted was a young lawyer named Avinash Deobhakta. He was the principal state attorney in Uganda’s Department of Public Prosecutions. After Amin’s purge began Deobhakta fled, concealed under a tarpaulin on the back of a lorry. He arrived in New Zealand in 1972 and became the first judge of Indian origin appointed in New Zealand. (I appeared before him on a drink driving charge in 1999\. He treated me leniently. Later we shared the same trainer at a Newmarket gym. He was a really nice little man who sadly died in 2015, aged 78.) Back to Entebbe and that first weekend of July 1976\. After negotiations failed to release the hostages, Israel’s leaders approved what even today would be regarded as an audacious attack and rescue mission. Israeli commandos flew 4000 kilometres in C-130 Hercules planes and launched their assault on Entebbe Airport late on the night of July 3\. With refuelling support from Kenya, the commandos rescued 102 hostages, killed 45 Ugandan soldiers and destroyed 11 Ugandan fighter jets. Only three hostages were killed, although a fourth, Dora Bloch, had been earlier taken to hospital because of illness. When Amin discovered that he and his military had been humiliated, he ordered the sick woman be murdered in hospital. Her remains were found east of the Ugandan capital Kampala in 1979. The major Israeli casualty was the unit commander Yonatan Netanyahu, brother of the man who became prime minister. The older Netanyahu was 30 years old when died in a firefight at Entebbe. The raid has spawned movies, books and documentaries. *Victory at Entebbe* starring Anthony Hopkins, Burt Lancaster and Elizabeth Taylor was made and released that same year. *Raid on Entebbe* with Peter Finch and Charles Bronson was out in 1977. Entebbe today is a bustling but still obviously poor city in a poor country about half an hour’s drive from Kampala. The cities are connected by a tolled expressway built by Chinese contractors. “There is no money in this country to build such a motorway” our tour guide tells us ruefully. The United Nations presence is hard to miss. The old airport is now the distribution and security centre for UN operations in neighbouring Somalia and South Sudan. White vehicles with the stark black UN lettering are a common sight. Our guide says one of the country’s better export earners is having Ugandan military stationed as peacekeepers across Africa. The current population is 52 million, up 2.6 per cent on a year ago with the country a welcoming home to refugees from its war-torn neighbours. As well, the fertility rate is four children per woman and the country’s median age is just 17. Anyone who has driven the rough clay roads in the east of the country en route to the famous mountain gorilla environs will not be surprised by that extraordinarily low median age. You can’t help but feel a sense of helplessness as you speed by in a Toyota Land Cruiser and see literally thousands of little cherubs standing on the side of the road waving. When you return from your gorilla encounter there are 20 or 30 more at the end of the track all with their own drawing of a gorilla which they hope you might buy off them for something. It’s heartless I know, but satisfying one means satisfying them all and that just makes it too hard. Gorilla tourism and conservation is an emerging industry, although this season has been hit by an Ebola scare, a thorough nuisance say many guides, because there’s been no Ebola in Uganda. The outbreak has been in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Uganda’s prospects for economic salvation don’t appear great. There is mineral wealth and oil and some exploration and extraction is underway. But any country that has had the same president/dictator for 40 years is unlikely to flourish. Yoweri Museveni turned 82 the day I wrote this. He came to power after the Ugandan Bush War of 1986 and has prevailed ever since through nefarious methods. International observers say the country is ruled as an illiberal democracy with the media under the control of the government. There are posters around Entebbe already punting his son Muhoozi Kainerugaba, currently chief of defence forces, as his successor in five years! Fifty years ago Uganda was world news because of the Amin regime and the Entebbe Raid. Aviation security is such that hijacking is now impossible so what happened in this city half a century ago will never be repeated. But only last month, as a sign of a new chapter in Ugandan-Israeli relations, the son of the president and military chief unveiled a statue of Yonatan Netanyahu, the Israeli PM’s brother killed in the raid. A few days later on August 6th, the country’s parliament approved the deployment of up to 500 Ugandan military personnel as part of the International Stabilisation Force in Gaza under US command. That’s a hell of a turnaround in 50 years, especially in country where 13 per cent of the population is Muslim. This article was originally published on the [author’s Substack](https://peterallanwilliams.substack.com/p/remembering-entebbe).