The summer of 1985 was a particularly gruesome one for terrorist incidents. One of the more memorable was the hijacking of Trans World Airlines flight 847 en route to Rome from Athens in the early morning of June 14, 1985. Hezbollah terrorists were able to seize the plane and divert its course to Beirut. Onboard were 139 passengers, eight crew members, and several Shiite Hezbollah terrorists, who demanded the release of hundreds of Shiite Muslims held in Israeli prisons. The hostage crisis of TWA Flight 847 lasted for 17 days — the plane landed twice in the Beirut International Airport, twice in Algiers, and once more in Beirut. The world watched as the events unfolded live on CNN, which had premiered just five years earlier.
The terrorists had a list of demands, including the release of those involved in the 1983 bombing of U.S. Embassy Beirut. Through careful negotiations, terrorists Mohammed Ali Hammadi and Hasan Izz al-Din allowed a number of hostages to be released in exchange for fuel and food during one of the stopovers in Algeria. After landing in Beirut for the last time, the terrorists kept the remaining hostages in a Lebanese prison where they were kept mostly unharmed. After the crisis had ended, Israel ended up releasing over 700 Shia prisoners over the following weeks, though it asserted that the prisoners' release was not related to the hijacking.
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