Israel has released some audio of the Entebbe raid. Ynet provides the audio and a transcript.
The missing passenger was Dora Bloch who had been taken to the hospital. After the rescue she was killed.
(h/t Jack’s Shack)
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
Update by Meryl: Dora Bloch was murdered on the orders of Idi Amin, dictator of Uganda, after the successful raid that rescued most of the other the hostages.
Now confidential cabinet papers released under the Freedom of Information Act show that the British High Commission in Kampala received a report from a Ugandan civilian that Mrs Bloch had been shot and her body dumped in the boot of a car which had Ugandan intelligence services number plates.
The same informant said that the body of a white woman had been found in a sugar plantation 19 miles from the capital. A further intelligence report says the face had been badly burnt, making identification difficult, but that the legs looked “bad” and that could have been the leg ulcers from which doctors confirmed she was suffering. The policeman guarding Mrs Bloch was also murdered, said the report.
[…] A confidential Foreign Office memo written by James Hennessy, the British High Commissioner to Uganda, says: “She had been seen by a consultant at Mulago Hospital last Sunday long after the Israeli commandos had come and gone. Since then she had been not seen anywhere. Our information was that she had been dragged from her bed at hospital screaming. Though she had been living in Israel, she was a British national and our responsibility. The Prime Minister has decided that I should come out and inquire into her disappearance and then report to him. The parliament, the whole British people, were concerned about her fate. She appeared to be an innocent victim of the Israeli raid.”
A second confidential Foreign Office briefing report sent to No 10 says the most likely scenario was that Mrs Bloch was killed by Ugandan soldiers “bitter and dangerous following their disgrace at Israeli hands”. About 50 Ugandan soldiers were killed by the Israelis during the raid. The report adds: “They may have seized on the only available Jew on whom to extract their revenge.”
Dora Bloch was a 74-year-old grandmother, whose only “crime” was being Jewish. Idi Amin lived peacefully in exile in Saudi Arabia, protected by the Wahabbi oil ticks from the justice he so richly deserved, for the next 24 years.
A tragedy in the case of Mrs Bloch, but overall a brilliant victory and strategic masterstroke for the IDF, not equalled by any country in the years since.
The Entebbe Raid was one of the most brilliant small unit commando actions in history. It was also a warning to anyone who wanted to kill Jews, Zahal will hunt you down even if you are far away.
I remember it well, the day of the Raid. For many days the tension had been rising, with the Jews picked out from among the passengers and threatened with murder by German terrorists. The French pilot courageously tried to stay with them, but was shipped out of Uganda with the other crew and passengers who were not Jewish. Then I turned on the radio about noon on July 4, 1976, and heard the news that Zahal had raided Entebbe and saved almost all the passengers. Courage and boldness had brought a victory out of what had seemed an irredeemable tragedy and a monstrous reversion to Nazi actions by Israel’s (and the West’s) enemies.
It is characteristic of Zahal that the only Israel soldier KIA in the Raid was a Lieutenant Colonel, Jonathan Netanyahu, leading from the front. In 1973 he had commanded the General Staff Reconaissance Company, an elite unit, on the Syrian Front. He should be remembered by Jews forever, and I can see a time 2000 years from now when nobody in the world knows who Idi Amin was, except that he appears as a new Haman in a Jewish tale of Netanyahu’s heroic deeds, and of the Lord’s mercy for His people.
Israeli military tactics and strategy so confound our enemies, that all they can do is strike at sick 74 year old grandmothers.
It is our enemies way.
“She appeared to be an innocent victim of the Israeli raid.”
And here we can see the seeds of the “blame the rescuers, not the murderers” mentality in Britain, which have born generations of Jew-hating fruit since. An innocent victim of Idi Amin’s wounded pride? Hell no, she was an innocent victim of those damned Israelis, and their sheer unmitigated gall to rescue almost all the hostages, instead of recognizing that they can’t rescue them all so it’s better to let them all be killed. They act like their own people’s lives are more important than the opinion of feckless international aristocrats! The NERVE, I tell you!