On the night of July 4, 1976, four Israeli Air Force Hercules aircraft landed at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. The aircraft carried some 200 fighters from Sayeret Matkal, the Paratroopers Brigade, and the Golani Brigade. This was “Operation Jonathan,” the rescue operation for the hostages aboard Air France Flight 139, which became a global milestone in the fight against terrorism.
On June 8, 2024, forty-eight years later, special forces from the Shin Bet and the Border Police’s Yamam, with extensive support from IDF forces, raided two buildings in the heart of the Nuseirat Camp in the Gaza Strip and rescued four Israeli hostages in an operation known as “Operation Arnon.”
The symbolic and tragic similarity between the two operations is that both succeeded, and in both cases their commanders were killed, with the operations subsequently bearing their names: the first was named after Lt. Col. Yonatan Netanyahu, the late commander of Sayeret Matkal, who was critically wounded and died of his injuries; the second was named after Arnon Zamora, the late Yamam team commander, who was mortally wounded during the operation and also died of his injuries.
It is difficult to see the similarity between the two operations, given that the first took place some 3,800 kilometers from Israel, against a sovereign state whose leader, Idi Amin, cooperated with the terrorists; whereas the second took place in the heart of an active combat zone controlled by a terrorist organization, within a densely populated civilian environment of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the immediate area and many more throughout the Gaza Strip.
The comparison between Operation Jonathan and Operation Arnon is not intended to determine which was more dangerous, complex, or daring. It is doubtful whether such a determination can even be made. Rather, the comparison is important for formulating strategy: how decisions should ideally be made under conditions of extreme uncertainty; how to deal with pressure from the hostages’ families; and the need for high-quality intelligence, meticulous planning, and a high level of operational capability. How similar and how different were the two operations? To what extent have the guiding principles for negotiating with terrorists over the release of hostages changed, or remained intact?
Operationally, the differences between the two operations are clear, primarily because of the distance: approximately 3,800 kilometers in one case and close to zero in the other. The first involved the enormous challenge of maintaining secrecy, in an operation in which the military had to deploy a large force in a distant sovereign state: planning long-distance flight routes, refueling aircraft, and ensuring the ability to execute the operation accurately and rapidly, without the possibility of relying on real-time assistance from additional forces in the event of complications, not only from the Ugandan military but also from other African countries.
In the Nuseirat operation, the distance was relatively short, but the complexity was of a different kind. The forces operated within an active combat zone among a large and hostile civilian population, alongside thousands of armed terrorists, with the threats and risks directed not only at the hostages but also at the rescue force.
Entebbe was a challenging combination of distance and operational considerations; Nuseirat, being closer, presented the challenge of achieving operational depth inside enemy territory.
Intelligence in Public Libraries and Travel Agencies
Another significant difference between the two operations was the intelligence challenge, both in terms of the means and quality available and the amount of time the forces had to collect “intelligence for the operation” (MALAM).
In Operation Jonathan, the challenge was to gather intelligence from scratch. The intelligence agencies had not been collecting information on Uganda, and Entebbe was not a familiar target at all.
“Where the hell is Entebbe?” asked Gadi Zohar, head of the Terrorism Branch in the IDF Intelligence Directorate’s Research Division, on the night of June 27, 1976, when news broke that the aircraft had landed in Entebbe. It is important to remember that at the time, the availability of information was completely different from what we have today. There was no internet as we know it, no Google, and certainly no artificial-intelligence chatbots. Satellites, drones, and unmanned aerial vehicles were also not available at the time, so the challenge was figuring out how to even begin collecting intelligence.
So, soldiers in civilian clothes were sent to university libraries, bookstores, and travel agencies to gather information, searching for and locating books and maps. The defense establishment later recalled that many Israelis had visited Africa and that a large military delegation had even traveled to the continent. They began debriefing them and discovered that Solel Boneh had built Entebbe Airport, leading to the collection of photographs and 8mm films taken at the airport.
The problem was that all this information was current only as of 1972, when diplomatic relations with Uganda were severed, four years before the hijacking. Intelligence efforts were subsequently deepened through the former head of the military delegation, who had held direct conversations with Idi Amin, as well as through the debriefing in Paris of foreign hostages who had been released. The most significant intelligence development came from a Mossad operation that, five days after the hijacking and one day before the operation, sent a Mossad volunteer operative with a pilot’s license from London to Kenya. He rented a light aircraft there and flew to Entebbe. The operative photographed the airport from the air and provided a critical report that there were no air-defense systems at the airport, information that enabled aerial photographs to reach the forces at the last moment.
And yet significant intelligence gaps remained, or what then-Chief of Staff Motta Gur described as an “intelligence fog.” For example, intelligence did not know whether the terrorists possessed explosives. “Intelligence full of holes like Swiss cheese,” commanders and intelligence personnel would later testify about the information available before the operation. In retrospect, the central question was whether it was right to launch an operation with intelligence of this quality.
Months Versus Hours
If the partial intelligence available was not enough, the time available to the defense establishment was virtually nonexistent. From the moment of the hijacking on the afternoon of June 27 until the rescue operation on the night of July 4, there was ostensibly a week, but the decision to launch the operation was made only two days beforehand. In practice, therefore, the defense establishment had less than 48 hours for intelligence preparations and less than 36 hours for operational preparations.
In this respect, the difference between the Entebbe operation and Operation Arnon is profound, and not only because of the technological capabilities that developed over the 50 years separating the two.
When it became known on May 12, 2024, that the four hostages were being held in the Nuseirat Camp, all intelligence-gathering capabilities were activated. These included signals intelligence, surveillance, and human intelligence, HUMINT, including a Shin Bet undercover unit that entered the camp.
The time available for Operation Arnon was also far greater. Since October 7, 2023, eight months before the operation, intensive intelligence collection had begun at all levels to locate the hostages. Intelligence succeeded in locating many of them, but in many cases the problem was the operational feasibility of reaching them without endangering their lives.
From the moment the intelligence breakthrough led to the identification of the four hostages, on May 12, efforts focused on the specific area in Nuseirat. The undercover operatives made a decisive contribution to gathering field intelligence, enabling the creation of a clearer intelligence picture of the hostages’ location, the size of the terrorists’ forces, and the threats along the route to them and inside the apartments where they were being held.
As preparations progressed, coordination between the intelligence agencies and the operational forces became increasingly close. This synchronization was necessary to continue their joint work in real time and adapt the plan to changes on the ground.
The Political Courage and Willingness to Take Responsibility
In both cases, as in all operations, it is clear that good intelligence makes the decision-makers’ task easier and is essential to the operation’s success. In both cases, decision-makers faced a fateful dilemma: whether to negotiate the release of the hostages or launch a military operation, with all the risks that entailed. In dilemmas of this kind, the information available to decision-makers is always incomplete, yet it is critical to the decision-making process. In effect, this is a test of leadership.
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged when opening an exhibition on Operation Jonathan at the Rabin Center in 2015: “…the operation also required the courage of leaders: of Defense Minister Shimon Peres, who pushed for action; of the ministers who approved it; and above all, of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who made the decisive decision. Without his determination, courage, and leadership, the operation would not have taken place.”
He said these words after praising and saluting the fighters, commanders, pilots, intelligence personnel, and everyone involved at the operational level.
In this context, Amos Eran, director of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s bureau and his political adviser, also testified that on the morning of Saturday, July 3, several hours before the government was due to decide whether to approve the operation, Rabin instructed him to draft a letter of resignation. Rabin hoped the operation would succeed, but he was deeply concerned about failure, the killing of dozens of hostages, and the loss of soldiers. There was also concern that the aircraft might be damaged.
He therefore also demanded that the Mossad chief obtain up-to-date and accurate intelligence on Entebbe Airport. In particular, he demanded that it be determined whether there were defense systems at the airport and whether there were surface-to-air missiles that could endanger the Air Force aircraft, our forces, and the hostages.
The intelligence from the Mossad’s extraordinary operation arrived, as noted, only at the last moment, less than 24 hours before the aircraft took off. The aerial photographs from that operation arrived only on the morning of the operation, shortly before the decisive discussion.
By contrast, in Nuseirat in 2024, a decision was required to operate in the heart of a combat zone, where the hostages were being held in an area teeming with terrorists and in proximity to a hostile civilian population. In Operation Arnon, the challenge of reaching the hostages was simpler, but the opposing side was better prepared for an attack.
The Element of Surprise
Another significant difference between the operations was that in Nuseirat there were two targets, two apartments, whereas in Entebbe there was a single target for the hostage rescue: the main terminal where the hostages were being held.
Operation Arnon required two rescue operations to be carried out simultaneously in two separate buildings. This meant precise coordination and synchronization down to the second in order to preserve the element of surprise. It required the ability to manage multiple arenas simultaneously and an understanding that any change at one target could affect the other. Of course, contingency plans were also required in case the operation was disrupted, and such plans were indeed needed and activated during the operation.
This complexity required a combination of advance planning and the ability to adapt rapidly to changing circumstances. In both Entebbe and Nuseirat, the element of surprise was essential. In both cases, surprise, speed of action, and the initial shock enabled the force to gain a significant advantage.
While at Entebbe the element of surprise was sufficient both to eliminate the terrorists and to rescue 103 hostages alive, with three hostages killed, in Nuseirat, after the forces entered, they had to contend with fierce resistance from hundreds and thousands of fighters, heavy fire directed at the force, the hostages, and the vehicles, and the need to evacuate the hostages and the force from the hostile environment within a short period of time. The risk was particularly evident during the rescue from the building where three of the hostages were being held, when the force had to combine combat and protection with the evacuation and treatment of Commander Arnon Zamora while he was being evacuated.
The operation’s success resulted from the advance planning and the scale of the combined forces, land, sea, and air, deployed according to a carefully prepared plan.
The Bottom Line
The 50 years between Entebbe and Nuseirat reflect a revolution in the way Israel employs force: technology has changed, intelligence capabilities have developed immeasurably, command-and-control systems have become far more sophisticated, and above all, cooperation and synchronization among all the partners have stood out.
Yet alongside all these changes, the similarities in decision-making processes and the willingness to take responsibility stand out, as do the courage and professionalism of the forces and commanders’ ability to operate under conditions of pressure and uncertainty.
Operation Jonathan and Operation Arnon are two milestones separated by time, but they reflect a similar approach, based on the State of Israel’s commitment to its citizens. In such circumstances, the combination of high-quality intelligence, meticulous planning that takes extreme scenarios into account, high operational capabilities, and leadership willing to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty and take responsibility in the event of failures is essential.
From the perspective of half a century, the common element stands out, alongside the enormous transformations in operational and technological capabilities: the commitment to the safety of civilians and soldiers, behind which stands an uncompromising fighting spirit that includes a willingness to sacrifice.
