Twenty years after Gilad Shalit was abducted, the Israeli military archives have released operational logs from the southern Gaza brigade that reconstruct, minute by minute, how soldiers in the command post realized a soldier had been taken into Gaza. The records, written in real time on June 25, 2006, show the shift from an initial sense of confusion to the blunt conclusion that a serviceman had been kidnapped, and they include the first notation of his name, “Gilad Shalit.”
The attack began around 5:13 a.m. near Kerem Shalom, when a Hamas cell, together with operatives from the Popular Resistance Committees and the Army of Islam, crossed into Israel through an attack tunnel about 300 meters long. They struck a tank, a guard post and an armored personnel carrier. Sgt. Hanan Barak and Staff Sgt. Pavel Slutsker were killed, four soldiers were wounded, and Shalit was taken to Gaza. The abduction later led to Operation Summer Rains and, in 2011, the Shalit deal under which he was freed in exchange for 1,027 prisoners. Many of those released, led by Yahya Sinwar, later rose to the top of Hamas and helped plan the October 7 massacre.
The logs show the first reports of explosions at 5:13, followed by orders to scramble attack helicopters, reports of soldiers at the fence, anti-tank fire, and reinforcements being sent. At 5:34 the record notes that all tanks had been dispatched, and shortly afterward commanders were already writing that one soldier in the Panther tank was probably dead. By 6:34, the picture had become one of two dead, wounded soldiers inside the tank, and one missing soldier.
At 6:40 came the phrase that became emblematic of that morning, “A soldier is missing from the tank.” Four minutes later, the code word “Hannibal” was entered, though the logs later showed the kidnappers had already crossed back into Gaza with Shalit at 5:21, meaning the procedure was activated too late to be operationally useful. By 6:48 commanders were treating it as a likely kidnapping. Later entries note a vest and helmet found on the fence, Shalit’s official identification at 8:00, a Sayeret Matkal rescue force arriving at 9:18, footprints identified west of the fence at 9:52, and, at 13:38, his bullet-pocked, bloodied vest.
An undated later assessment in the logs said, “The soldier is probably alive, we do not know where he is, he may not be in our area, the attack was by Hamas.” The same note says the attack had been planned for about three weeks, may have been aided by an observer in the tunnel, and could have been designed to trigger a wider escalation. By 5:21 p.m., commanders were also recording an unverified rumor that Shalit had been moved through a tunnel to Egypt.
