Ahead of the 50th anniversary of Operation Entebbe, Israel’s State Archives has unsealed thousands of pages of government documents chronicling the country’s handling of the 1976 Air France hijacking crisis.
The release, made through the Israel State Archives within the Prime Minister’s Office, includes complete transcripts of Cabinet and Security Cabinet meetings, records from a special security team formed under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and files being made available to the public for the very first time. Officials described the collection as a comprehensive record of how the government managed the crisis from start to finish.
The documents follow the government’s decision-making process from the moment contact was first lost with the Air France flight following its layover in Athens, all the way through the rescue operation carried out one week later.
Cabinet records reveal that Rabin interrupted an ongoing government meeting to inform ministers that the aircraft appeared to have been hijacked. At that point, officials had learned the plane had touched down in Benghazi, Libya, but still had no information about who the hijackers were, what they wanted, or where the plane was ultimately headed.
When Eli Mizrahi, Rabin’s chief of staff, suggested that ministers stay on call for further updates that day, Rabin pushed back. “There is no need whatsoever for that,” Rabin said. “My intention is to hold the government of France responsible for the fate of the Israelis flying on the Air France plane and not to absolve the government of France from this responsibility.”
The newly released materials also include, for the first time, audio recordings of 26 phone conversations between Mizrahi and Rabin, the Foreign Ministry director general, and other senior officials during the hostage standoff. Also included are transcripts of five conversations between Col. Baruch Bar-Lev and Ugandan ruler Idi Amin.
Other documents in the release cover diplomatic exchanges with France and other nations whose citizens were on the hijacked plane, records tied to United Nations Security Council discussions following the operation, hundreds of letters written to Rabin after the rescue, expired-copyright photographs, files related to films made about Operation Entebbe, and materials honoring Lt. Col. Yonatan Netanyahu, commander of the General Staff Reconnaissance Unit, who lost his life during the raid.
One particularly striking document among the newly public files is an interview with hostage Yitzhak David, who was injured during the rescue. David recalled that being separated from the non-Israeli hostages brought back painful memories from his time as a Holocaust survivor.
