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wig, which came off in his hand. As she began screaming, Marco instinctively
struck her across the face, but he used the hand in which he had his Beretta. The
gun went off, and the bullet grazed Bibi in his upper arm.
When Uzi Dayan had finally got in through the rear door, he’d run up
against a stocky, suntanned man blocking in his way, and fired — thankfully,
only into his midsection. He turned out to be one of the passengers, a film-
maker from Austria. Still, there was the other woman hijacker to deal with.
Several of the passengers pointed to the floor just ahead of Uzi, where she lay
curled up, holding a grenade with the pin out. Ordering her loudly, sternly, not
to move, Uzi wrapped his hand over hers, extracted the grenade from her grasp
finger by finger, replaced the pin, and had one of his men lead her out of the
plane and down the stairs.
All the hijackers had been either killed or captured.
Tragically, in the initial crossfire, a 22-year-old passenger named Miriam
Holtzberg, had been hit. Although the man whom Uzi had mistakenly shot
recovered, she did not. Yet all of the remaining passengers and crew were now
free and safe, alive and unharmed.
I felt a mix of emotions when it was over: pride, a sense of achievement
against all the odds. And huge relief at having succeeded in ending the ordeal of
the captives. Without my saying so, everyone in the unit understood that my
inaugural comments as commander, about our need to become a full special-
forces unit, were no longer a distant wish. Still, I knew this was only one step,
and I wanted to make sure we kept our feet on the ground. The day after the
Sabena rescue, Israeli newspapers devoted acres of newsprint to how the
operation had succeeded. Since Sayeret Matkal’s existence was still an official
secret, the headline writers called us, variously, a “special” unit, a “select” unit
and even in one case, because of our El Al coveralls, “angels in white.” We did,
briefly, celebrate back at the sayeret base. But as with every other operation, we
went through a self-critical assessment of what we could have done better. How,
if we had to do another hostage-rescue operation, could we make sure none of
the passengers was harmed? How could we improve co-ordination among the
assault teams? And minimize the risk of shooting each other. Why had I, as
commander of the operation, had to wait for someone else to suggest the idea of
disguising ourselves as aircraft technicians? And why had we failed to train
with Berettas and other pistols as well as Uzis?
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