Yoni Netanyahu

Yonatan “Yoni” Netanyahu (13 March 1946 to 4 July 1976) was the Israeli special-forces officer who commanded the ground assault at Entebbe, Uganda, the raid that freed 102 hostages from PFLP and German hijackers and became the definitive Israeli answer to the era’s wave of airline terrorism. He was the only Israeli soldier killed in the operation. He is remembered both as a decorated combat officer who fought in two of Israel’s wars and as the elder brother of Benjamin Netanyahu, whose own political career has never fully stepped out of Yoni’s shadow.

Who he was

Yoni Netanyahu was born in New York City on 13 March 1946 to Benzion Netanyahu, a historian of Spanish Jewry, and Cela Netanyahu. The family moved to Jerusalem in his childhood and later to Philadelphia, where his father taught. He was the eldest of three brothers: Benjamin, later Israel’s prime minister, and Iddo, a physician and writer. Yoni was academically gifted, briefly attended Harvard University in 1967 to 1968 on the Dean’s List, then left, homesick for Israel, and enrolled at Hebrew University in Jerusalem to study philosophy and mathematics. He never finished the degree; the army kept pulling him back.

What he did

Drafted into the Israel Defense Forces in 1964, Netanyahu served in the Paratroopers Brigade and was wounded in the elbow rescuing another soldier during the Six-Day War of June 1967. By the early 1970s he had joined Sayeret Matkal, the IDF’s most elite reconnaissance unit, rising to deputy commander in 1972. He fought in cross-border raids into Lebanon and, in October 1973, commanded a task force on the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur War, where Israeli forces under officers like Moshe Dayan absorbed a surprise two-front invasion before turning it back; Netanyahu’s own unit accounted for dozens of Syrian officers in the counterattack, and he was awarded the Medal of Distinguished Service, Israel’s third-highest decoration. He took command of Sayeret Matkal in 1975.

Where and when: Entebbe

On 27 June 1976, four hijackers, two from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and two German nationals from the Revolutionary Cells, seized Air France Flight 139 out of Athens and diverted it to Entebbe, Uganda, where dictator Idi Amin’s regime gave them safe harbor. The hijackers released most of the 248 passengers but held back roughly 105 Jewish and Israeli hostages along with the French crew, a separation that made explicit what the operation was: a hostage-taking targeted at Jews as Jews, not at France or at travelers generally. Israel’s government under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin authorized a rescue mission rather than negotiate on the hijackers’ terms, which included the release of dozens of convicted terrorists.

On 4 July 1976, Israeli C-130 transport planes flew nearly 2,500 miles, most of it over hostile or unfriendly airspace, to strike a target defended not only by the hijackers but by Ugandan soldiers loyal to Amin. Netanyahu commanded the ground force. His men drove into the terminal in a black Mercedes disguised as Amin’s motorcade, then stormed the building. All four hijackers and dozens of Ugandan troops were killed; 102 hostages came home. Netanyahu was shot, apparently by a Ugandan soldier firing from the control tower, and died before the planes left African soil. He was the only Israeli fatality of the raid, out of 102 hostages rescued and roughly 105 originally held; the discrepancy is accounted for by hostages who died in the crossfire or, in the case of Dora Bloch, murdered afterward on Amin’s orders after she had been hospitalized in Kampala. The operation, planned as Operation Thunderbolt, was renamed Operation Yonatan in his honor.

Why it mattered

Entebbe answered a specific propaganda claim of its decade: that a state faced with mass hostage-taking by ideological terrorists had no real options beyond capitulation or a bloodbath. Israel’s raid, executed with a single friendly-fire cost against a fortified airport thousands of miles from home, became the reference case cited by counterterrorism planners for a generation, studied by the US, German, and other special-operations communities that would later run their own hostage-rescue units. It also reset how PFLP-style hijackings were priced: after Entebbe, the assumption that Israel would negotiate through intermediaries or trade prisoners for hostages no longer held automatically, and airline hijacking as a Palestinian tactic declined through the following decade in favor of other methods.

Myths and legacy

The chief myth attached to Yoni Netanyahu is not about the raid’s facts, which are unusually well documented by participants on both the Israeli and hostage side, but about his politics: critics of his brother have periodically tried to recast Yoni posthumously as a dove or an ideological match for causes he never held, using his private letters selectively. The letters, published by his family as The Letters of Jonathan Netanyahu, in fact show a soldier who was contemplative and literate but also a committed nationalist who saw Sayeret Matkal service as a direct extension of Israel’s right to defend Jews wherever they were targeted. His father Benzion and his surviving brothers built two institutions around his memory: the Jonathan Institute, a counterterrorism research center founded in 1979 with support from figures including future prime minister Menachem Begin, and the continued publication of his writings. In a 2005 Israeli poll he was voted the 13th-greatest Israeli in the nation’s history. His death at 30 remains the fixed point around which much of his brother’s political identity, and Israel’s own memory of Entebbe, still orbits.

The PFLP · Yitzhak Rabin · Moshe Dayan · Who attacked first in the Yom Kippur War · The IDF · Who Attacked First, every war