“Mission Impossible,” was the Daily Mail’s headline the day after the Entebbe Operation. “No country in the world would dare try such an operation, as it truly was a mission impossible,” the British paper wrote. “But Israel dared—and won.”

“One of the most shining examples of an operation conducted by any army,” Yaacov Caroz assessed in the daily Yedioth Ahronoth, and the myth was born: That very day, the operation in Entebbe became one of the most well-known commando operations in history. On Sunday, June 27, 1976, Air France’s Flight 139 left from Ben Gurion Airport, made a stopover in Athens, and then took off towards its final destination, Paris, with 248 passengers on board. At around 12:35pm, four terrorists—two German and two Palestinian—hijacked the plane.

After a stopover in Libya, where additional terrorists came on board, the hijacked plane landed in Uganda. Its passengers were led to the old terminal building, where they were guarded by the kidnappers and Ugandan army soldiers. On the third day, June 29, the terrorists decided to separate the Israelis and Jews from the rest of the passengers and released the latter group.

Read the full report at Ynet.