First on the ground in Entebbe

very few of were confident that they were ready.

They were all, like Mr Sherman, young men, many of whom had never left Israel before. But he said fear was not something they felt or discussed: “In the 1970s it was hardly acceptable for the IDF to talk about fear or to have tears in your eyes. It was only years later that people wrote about the fear they felt going to Entebbe”.

Rami Sherman was in the first Hercules to land, and with 33 others scrambled into a jeep behind one of the Mercedes cars brought to resemble the car used by Uganda’s ruler, Idi Amin. The hope was to dupe the Ugandan forces manning the Entebbe base that Amin himself had arrived to talk to the hostages, as he had previously done.

“I was with five soldiers and our orders were to shoot at the control tower [of the airport] to stop gunfire from the Ugandan soldiers — which happened immediately,” he recounted. A gunfight ensued and then after about 20 minutes, he said, he caught his first sight of the bewildered hostages. Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother was killed in the Entebbe operation