Newly declassified cabinet protocols from June 1976 reveal a sharp exchange between PM Yitzhak Rabin and Defense Minister Shimon Peres, days before the Operation Entebbe raid, over whether the rescue could succeed or hostages would be killed. The documents were published Friday by Israeli state archives.
Newly declassified cabinet protocols, published Friday by the Israel State Archives, lay bare the tense pre-Entebbe debate between Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Defense Minister Shimon Peres. The documents, first reported on by The Zioneer on Friday morning, show Rabin and Peres confronting a harrowing question: could the IDF operation succeed, or would the hostages — among them the then-unknown Yonatan Netanyahu, later to be killed in the raid — be killed before the rescue forces arrived? The protocols, kept classified for decades, add a new layer to the already-famous 1976 rescue, highlighting the weight of the gamble taken by the government.
3 developments
- DevelopingYair Golan accuses Netanyahu of obstructing hostage deal, says PM willing to let captives rot
- StrongDeclassified protocols reveal Israeli cabinet's internal debates ahead of Operation Entebbe
- StrongMK Gilad Kariv tells Netanyahu: 'Thank you for 46 hostages who died because of you?'
- DevelopingZe'ev Elkin: 'Give and take' between politicians and media shouldn't be a criminal offense
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