Uganda's Army Chief Unveils Statue of Netanyahu's Brother Days Before Approving Troops for Gaza

In early August, Uganda's military unveiled a bronze statue of Yonatan Netanyahu at the Old Entebbe Terminal, the site where Israeli commandos killed 45 Ugandan soldiers in 1976 without Kampala's consent. Netanyahu, brother of Israel's current prime minister, was the only Israeli soldier killed in that raid.

The statue was commissioned by General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, Uganda's army chief and the eldest son of President Yoweri Museveni, to mark the operation's 50th anniversary. It depicts Netanyahu standing with a machine gun.

Days after the unveiling, Uganda's parliament approved sending troops to Gaza as part of the International Stabilisation Force, an arrangement critics have called controversial given Israel's continued military operations there despite a ceasefire agreed last October.

From condemnation to commemoration

The raid, known in Israel as Operation Thunderbolt and later renamed Operation Jonathan in Netanyahu's honor, was a unilateral incursion into sovereign Ugandan territory. Israeli special forces flew thousands of kilometers to storm Entebbe airport, killing every hijacker and 45 Ugandan soldiers stationed there. At the time, the operation was widely understood, including by many African governments, as a violation of Ugandan sovereignty carried out under Idi Amin, who had personally received the hijackers and backed their operation.

That a bronze likeness of the raid's Israeli commander now stands at the same site, commissioned by Uganda's own army leadership, is a striking reversal. General Kainerugaba described the monument at its unveiling as a tribute to "courage in the face of danger" and "unwavering commitment to protecting innocent lives," language that erases the Ugandan soldiers killed in the same operation from the narrative being memorialized on their own soil.

A relationship with a long, uneven history

Israel courted Uganda as an early strategic foothold in Africa after independence, building roads and the airport itself, training Ugandan police and military, and funding student fellowships. Amin's 1971 coup had Israeli and British backing, and his first foreign trip as ruler was to Israel.

That relationship collapsed within a year. Amin cut diplomatic ties in 1972, expelled Israeli advisers and nationals, canceled arms and construction deals, and housed a PLO delegation in the former Israeli ambassador's residence. Two dozen other African states severed ties with Israel after the 1973 war. The Entebbe raid three years later was, among other things, a demonstration of Israeli reach into a state that had turned against it.

What the statue signals now

Middle East Eye frames the monument's timing, arriving just before Uganda's parliamentary vote on Gaza deployment, as evidence of a deepening security relationship between Kampala and Israel. No Ugandan or Israeli official has publicly confirmed that connection, and it remains an interpretation rather than a documented fact. But the sequence is hard to ignore: a government that once expelled Israeli advisers and armed itself against Israeli sovereignty violations is now commemorating the raid's Israeli commander on Ugandan soil while sending its own soldiers into an Israeli-shaped stabilization arrangement in Gaza.

The statue has already drawn criticism in Uganda and elsewhere on the continent. It stands as a case study in how military memorials can be used to rewrite contested history and cement present-day alliances, regardless of whose dead get left out of the bronze.