Gilad Shalit

Gilad Shalit: Five Years, Four Months, One Name

For more than five years a single Israeli name was written on placards, printed on bumper stickers, raised in the G8's communiqué and granted honorary citizenship by Paris, Rome, Miami, New Orleans, Baltimore and Pittsburgh. The person attached to it was a nineteen-year-old tank gunner who had been in the army for eleven months when he was dragged through a tunnel into Gaza. Gilad Shalit did nothing to become one of the most recognisable names in the Middle East. That is precisely the point of his story.

Mitzpe Hila

Shalit was born on 28 August 1986 in Nahariya, in the far north of Israel, to Noam and Aviva Shalit, the middle of three children between an older brother, Yoel, and a younger sister. The family lived at Mitzpe Hila, a small community in the Western Galilee. He graduated with distinction from Manor Kabri High School in 2005. Through his grandmother he held French as well as Israeli citizenship — a detail that would later put a European head of state on the phone about him. He was a sports obsessive, a follower of Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball.

He was conscripted into the Israel Defense Forces in July 2005 and joined the Armor Corps despite a low medical profile that would have entitled him to something safer. He was a corporal, serving as a tank gunner on the Gaza border, when his life was interrupted.

Kerem Shalom

Early on 25 June 2006, Palestinian fighters from the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the Popular Resistance Committees and the Army of Islam came up through a tunnel near the Kerem Shalom crossing and attacked the position. Two Israeli soldiers were killed and two more wounded; two of the attackers died. Shalit, hit in the shoulder and with a broken left hand, was taken back through the tunnel into Gaza.

He was twenty days short of his twentieth birthday. Israel launched Operation Summer Rains in response, an offensive in which more than 400 Palestinians were killed. From the first hours, his name was attached to consequences on a scale he could not have imagined and did not control.

Underground

Hamas held him at undisclosed locations for five years and four months. The International Committee of the Red Cross asked repeatedly for access and was refused on the grounds that a visit might disclose where he was. Reports indicate he was kept underground in a booby-trapped position with two guards.

What he later said about it was measured. He had been treated harshly at the start, he acknowledged, though conditions improved toward the end; there was television and radio, enough food, and games of checkers and dominoes with his guards. He picked up some Arabic. When he came out he was pale, weak and malnourished, with vitamin deficiencies; on 4 November 2011 surgeons at Rambam Medical Center removed seven fragments of shrapnel from his elbow and forearm, five years after the wound was made.

Contact with the world outside amounted to almost nothing: three letters, one audio tape and one DVD, and the DVD had to be bought with the release of twenty Palestinian women prisoners. On 25 June 2007 Hamas issued an audio recording in which he said his condition was deteriorating and urged a swap. In it he also said something his captors presumably approved and that has been quoted ever since: "Just as I have parents, a mother and a father, the Palestinian prisoners also have mothers and fathers." In October 2009 a two-minute video showed him in a bare room holding a newspaper dated 14 September, addressing Prime Minister Netanyahu and his parents. It was the last proof of life for two years.

The Campaign

The case became a national fixation, and the person most responsible was not Gilad but his father. Noam Shalit turned himself into a full-time advocate — lobbying the Israeli government, Palestinian officials and Hamas intermediaries, meeting Jimmy Carter in April 2008, keeping the name in the newspapers when negotiations stalled. In late June 2010 the family marched from Mitzpe Hila toward the prime minister's residence in Jerusalem, gathering some 10,000 people behind them.

The internationalisation was extraordinary for a single corporal. The UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict called for his release in September 2009. Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel issued joint appeals; Dmitry Medvedev raised it with Hamas in Damascus in May 2010; the G8's Deauville Declaration of 27 May 2011 demanded it.

1,027

German and Egyptian mediation produced an agreement signed on 11 October 2011. On 18 October Israel began releasing 1,027 Palestinian prisoners — 450 in the first tranche, 577 later — in exchange for one man. Israeli government sources stated that those released were collectively responsible for 569 Israeli deaths. During the handover Hamas fighters wore suicide belts, ready to detonate if the terms changed.

Seventy-nine per cent of Israelis supported the deal. The opposing minority argued that it set a price on a soldier's life that would guarantee more abductions. Shalit was moved through Cairo and flown home by helicopter, reuniting with his parents at Tel Nof airbase. Shimon Peres came to Mitzpe Hila on 24 October to congratulate him on his endurance. Israeli media, unusually, agreed among themselves to limit coverage and leave him alone.

Afterwards

He was honourably discharged on 18 April 2012 as a sergeant major — the ranks had accumulated while he was underground — and classified a disabled veteran with at least 20 per cent disability. In June 2012, the basketball fan became a basketball writer: Yedioth Ahronoth hired him as a sports reporter and columnist covering the Israeli and European games, and sent him to Oklahoma City to cover the NBA Finals. He met Netanyahu, and Sarkozy at the Élysée. In February 2020 he became engaged to Nitzan Shabbat.

Why Gilad Is Called a Genius

He is not one, and it does no honour to him to pretend otherwise. Shalit's fame rests entirely on what was done to him, not on anything he thought, made or discovered. He was a nineteen-year-old conscript, a good student from a small Galilee town who liked basketball, and nothing in the public record suggests exceptional intellect, creative gift or unusual accomplishment before 25 June 2006. Every account of his significance is an account of other people's decisions: the men who came through the tunnel, the government that would not deal for five years and then did, the 1,027 prisoners exchanged for him, the 79 per cent who approved.

What the record does support is endurance, which is a different quality and not a trivial one. Five years and four months underground with two guards, no Red Cross visit, three letters and one video, no way of knowing whether anyone was still negotiating — the survival of a coherent, functioning person through that is a real achievement of the nervous system, if not of the intellect. There is also a small, hard-to-classify moral fact: the 2007 recording in which he observed that Palestinian prisoners also have mothers and fathers. He may have been made to say it. It was still true, and it is the one sentence of his that is quoted on both sides of the line.

What Remains

Shalit's name now denotes an event rather than a man. The argument his release provoked — 1,027 for one, and whether that was mercy or a standing invitation — was never settled, and in January 2024 he found himself sitting with the families of a new generation of hostages, the only Israeli who could tell them from experience what the waiting is like. He covers basketball, and has given his own account sparingly. That reticence is arguably the most he can do with a fame he never sought.

Achievements

• Affiliated with Israel Discount Bank Ltd.
• Educated at Reichman University
• Worked as sports columnist, military personnel and journalist