Murder of Dora Bloch

Dora Bloch (née Feinberg; October 1902 – July 1976) was an Israeli hostage on Air France Flight 139 on 26 June 1976. Taking off from Tel Aviv, Israel, and destined for Paris, France, the plane soon landed in Athens, Greece, for a scheduled stopover and was subsequently hijacked by two Palestinians from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and two Germans from the Revolutionary Cells, who rerouted to Benghazi, Libya, and then to Entebbe, Uganda, where they received support from Ugandan president Idi Amin. Bloch, who had become ill during the flight, was taken to a hospital in Kampala and was therefore not among the 102 hostages who were rescued when Israel executed Operation Thunderbolt aka 'Operation Yonatan' on 4 July 1976.

She disappeared shortly after the hostages were rescued; her status as a British citizen and Amin's complicity in the hijacking resulted in the United Kingdom severing diplomatic ties with the Commonwealth country. In 1979, during the Tanzanian invasion of Uganda, Bloch's body was discovered by Tanzanian soldiers at a sugar plantation near Kampala and subsequently returned to Israel, where she was buried in Jerusalem. In February 2007, declassified British government documents confirmed that she had been murdered by Ugandan authorities on Amin's orders.