9.12 Heros and Heroines of Israel: The Israeli Special Forces and the Sabena Rescue
In 1972 a Sabena plane was hijacked to Israel. The hijackers landed the plane in Israel and demanded that Israel release 315 jailed terrorists who would be flown on the hijacked plane to an Arab country. If Israel didn't comply, they would blow up the plane with ninety-four passengers and crew on board.
Israel decided to use one of their special forces, the Sayeret Matkal, to storm the plane and free the hostages. One of the members of the Sayeret Matkal also known as the Unit, wrote about what happened as follows:
Defense Minister Moshe Dayan started negotiating terms. This was meant to give the Unit time to improvise a rescue operation. But how do you storm a hijacked aircraft? Despite the rash of hijacking attempts worldwide at the time (326 in a four-year period between 1968 and 1972) no one had tried anything like this before. In an airport hangar we practiced storming an identical aircraft. We learned that it had a surprising number of entrances and that the emergency doors on the wings could be opened by striking them from the outside.
We practiced using low-caliber Beretta pistols and were told to hide them in our boots. The weapons we normally used, Kalashnikov assault rifles and Uzi submachine guns, were too big to conceal and their firepower would endanger the passengers.
Dayan told the terrorists that Israel yielded to their demands. It would release the jailed terrorists and send mechanics to prepare the plane for a flight to an Arab country of their choice. The plan was simple and ingenious. Sixteen of the Unit's soldiers would be dressed in white mechanics overalls. We would pretend that we had come to prepare the plane for takeoff while assuming our positions at the various entry points to the aircraft. We would then storm the entrances, kill the terrorists and free the hostages.
Each entrance had a Unit team commander responsible for breaking into the plane. As a senior team commander, I was assigned to storm through a wing entrance with two of my men... we sixteen "mechanics" boarded a baggage train and made our way to the hijacked plane. We stopped about one hundred meters away at a checkpoint manned by Red Cross personnel. It had been agreed that the mechanics were unarmed. This was a trick Dayan had prepared, along with several buses brought in full view of the plane and packed with the terrorists' supposedly released comrades...
Barak blew the whistle. We struck the door from the outside. It bounced outward. A terrorist in the aisle opopsite our entrance fired several shots at us and ran toward the front of the plane. He was cut down by one of our men coming in from the other wing.Another terrorist in the front of the plane was killed by Rachamim as he stormed the cockpit...The whole operation took less than two minutes. The two male terrorists were killed, the two women captured.
The Unit commander who told this story was shot in the arm by accident by one of the unit members. His name is Benjamin Netanyahu. He later became prime minister of Israel. You can read the whole story in his autobiography, which is called Bibi.
Here is a video showing how Sayeret Matkal practiced to board the plane. In the video they are practicing outside instead of the hangar but it shows the general idea.
Here is a video account of the rescue.
The above video ends by saying the Sabena rescue was one of the greatest rescues in Israel's history. There was however, a greater rescue, the rescue at Entebbe. That is the subject of the next lesson. That rescue was led by Bibi's brother, Yoni.
A movie was made about the Sabena rescue. You can see the movie at streamisrael.tv but it costs money.
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Palestinian terrorists learned from the Sabena rescue not to hijack planes to Israel. They came up with another plan, hijack planes to a country far from Israel and demand release of the terrorists from there. To learn about that hijack:
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