OPENING FIRE AS THEY STORMED THE PLANE’S emergency exits and charged up the aisle, Israel’s elite Sayeret Matkal commandos killed two Palestinian hijackers and overpowered the others, saving all but one hostage in a 10-minute mission hailed in Israel as a triumph of ingenuity and bravery.
In the vanguard on that spring day in 1972 was none other than current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose two brothers also served in Sayeret Matkal. But while his personal experience of hostage rescue makes him uniquely placed to take ultimate responsibility for deploying the force in one of the biggest crises in Israel’s history, the challenge this legendary unit faces now is many times greater than in any of its previous daring operations if it is to try to extract at least 222 hostages who were abducted by Hamas fighters and bundled back to the Gaza Strip during an unprecedented assault this month.
“In terms of what this unit can do and can’t do, this is a guy who would be completely familiar,” says Doron Avital, a former Sayerat Matkal commander whose teachings remain influential in the current leadership.
“He was the prime minister for 15 years, it means he approved many of the operations of the unit, so he knows the game, no question,” Avital tells Newsweek.
“But here it’s a big challenge,” he adds. “This is a rescue operation on no magnitude that we ever met, in the context of those hostages being in Gaza, in the context of this hidden infrastructure underneath the streets of Gaza. This is a big challenge...it’s a rescue operation in the context of war.”
A Legacy Written in Blood
Sayeret Matkal, whose official name translates as the General Staff Reconnaissance Unit, was established in 1957 as
