Ella Rosenkovitch was just five and a half years old when terrorists hijacked her family’s flight to Paris and diverted it to Entebbe, Uganda, on June 27, 1976.

But 50 years later, memories of the week she spent as a hostage before Israel’s legendary Operation Thunderbolt remain vivid — so much so that they motivated her to campaign for the return of Israelis kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, 2023.

“I was a small child at the time, and there are a lot of details that I only learned years later,” the 55-year-old Jerusalem resident told The Times of Israel in a telephone interview. “But I remember the most fateful moments very well.”

On the day of the hijacking, Rosenkovitch was on Air France Flight 139 with her parents and 10-year-old brother on a trip to visit her grandparents in Paris. Another brother, age 16, didn’t join the trip and remained in Israel alone. The flight, as expected, made a scheduled stop in Athens to pick up additional passengers.

But there, four terrorist hijackers — two Palestinians and two Germans — boarded the plane and forcefully diverted it, first to Libya and then to Uganda. Chaos erupted as the hijackers separated mothers and children from the rest of the passengers and moved them to the front rows of the aircraft, Rosenkovitch recalled.

“I remember that I didn’t understand what was happening, so I asked my brother,” Rosenkovitch said. “He said he didn’t know, but I still remember the terrified look on his face.”

Her next memory is of the moment the hostages disembarked at Entebbe International Airport, after a refueling stop in Benghazi, Libya. Her mother cracked a dry joke that would be repeated for decades inside the family.

“She said, ‘Kids, we’ve landed in Africa. I’ve always wanted to visit Africa,'” Rosenkovitch recalled. “The way she said it sounded so wise and clever at the time.”

As the hostages were evacuated to a cavernous old terminal building at the airport, the hijackers announced their demands: $5 million and the release of 53 pro-Palestinian terrorists. If their demands were not met within three days, they said, they would start killing hostages.

Daily life as hostages

As negotiations dragged on, an uneasy routine emerged. The hostages slept on mattresses strewn out on the floor of the airport terminal, trying to remain calm as they awaited their fates. They were fed three substantial meals a day, with meat and rice and “the biggest bananas I’d ever seen,” Rosenkovitch said.

As Rosenkovitch tells it, she was the youngest of about 15 children and teenagers who were among the more than 250 hostages held in the cavernous old terminal building at Entebbe. She enjoyed playing with some of the French kids until they were released back to France on June 30 and July 1. After that, only a group of 106 mainly Israeli........

© The Times of Israel