Gilad Shalit

Yesterday morning, Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who had been kept captive for almost five and a half years (after being abducted in 2006 by Hamas (Wikipedia) militants), was brought back home. He was brought back as part of a prisoner exhchange in which 1,027 Palestinian prisoners were returned to the Palestinian territories and the Gaza Strip. I think probably most of you if not all know about his return since it was covered internationally by many new agencies. That's why I'm not going to be talking about his release, but about his capture.

On the 25th of June, 2006, at around 5 o'clock in the morning began the bombardment of the Karem pass, an area on the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip. Not long before that, a squad of four militants got 100 meters deep into Israeli territory by using a tunnel that started in Gaza. As the IDF gathered intel on terrorist organizations' intentions to attack in Israeli territory using a tunnel they set up a decoy APC (Armored Personnel Carrier). After splitting up into 3 sub-squads, one attacked the APC, one attacked a lookout post and wounded 3 IDF soldier and one attacked a Merkava tank which was assigned to protect the border. During the attack on the tank, AT missiles were fired at it, causing a fire to burst inside the tank. Two of the tank's crew members got out of the tank and got shot and killed, the driver got stuck inside the tank and suffered injury and the fourth crew member - Gilad Shalit - was taken by the squad. The squad then proceeded to throw grenades into the tank and took Shalit with them to the other side of the fence (The border) at 5:21AM, just minutes after the start of the attack. During this entire event, unmanned lookout posts were taken out by RPGs, in order to make it difficult to understand what was going on.

The first picture of Gilad Shalit in Israel