On 27 June 1976, Air France Flight 139 left Tel Aviv for Paris with stops planned along the way. During the stopover in Athens, four hijackers boarded - two from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine's external operations wing, and two German members of the Revolutionary Cells. They seized the Airbus over the Mediterranean and ordered it south. After a refueling stop in Benghazi, the plane touched down at Entebbe more than a full day later, on 28 June. This was no random destination. Uganda's ruler, Idi Amin, had been told of the plan from the start. More than a hundred Ugandan soldiers helped guard the captives, and Amin himself came to the terminal, presenting himself to the frightened passengers as a friend working for their release.

What happened next gave the crisis its terrible shape. On 29 June, the captors knocked through a wall to open a second room, then separated the passengers - Israelis and Jews of other nationalities to one side, everyone else to the other. To the older hostages, the echo was unmistakable and unbearable. Over the following days the captors released 148 non-Israeli passengers, who were flown to Paris. The roughly hundred who remained, most of them Israeli, were kept under guard, along with the entire Air France crew. The crew could have left. Captain Michel Bacos refused, insisting that his passengers were his responsibility and that he would not abandon them. His flight attendants stayed with him. A deadline was set: meet the demand to free imprisoned militants, or the killing would begin on 1 July.

In Israel, ministers argued between negotiation and force until intelligence from the Mossad, including details from freed hostages and old construction plans of the terminal, made a raid seem possible. On the night of 3 July, four C-130 transport planes flew more than 4,000 kilometers to Uganda, hugging the terrain to stay off radar. The lead commandos rolled out in a black Mercedes meant to resemble Amin's own car, hoping to reach the building before the guards understood what was happening. The operation lasted roughly ninety minutes from landing to departure. The commandos killed all the hijackers and dozens of Ugandan soldiers, and destroyed Ugandan fighter jets on the ground to prevent pursuit. Of the hostages, 102 were brought home alive.

A rescue measured by numbers can hide the people inside them. Three hostages died during the operation, caught in the crossfire of a battle fought in darkness and confusion. A fourth, Dora Bloch, was not even there for the raid. A 74-year-old grandmother who held both Israeli and British citizenship, she had choked during the captivity and been taken to a hospital in Kampala. After the Israelis left empty-handed of her, Ugandan agents murdered her in revenge; her remains were not recovered for years. On the Israeli side, one soldier was killed: Yonatan Netanyahu, the unit commander, shot as the assault began. He was the older brother of Benjamin Netanyahu, who would later lead Israel. The operation was renamed in his memory.

Entebbe changed how the world thought about hostage rescue. Governments studied the operation; counter-terror units modeled themselves on it. But on the ground in Uganda the story was quieter and more human. The old terminal, by the lakeshore, still stands beside the modern airport, its walls deliberately left pocked with bullet marks. Israel and Uganda have spoken of turning it into a place of reconciliation rather than triumph - a memorial to the night when ordinary travelers became the center of the world, and to those, on every side, who did not survive it.