Twenty years after the event, the Israel Defense Forces archive at the Defense Ministry has authorized publication of the original operations logs from the day Gilad Shalit was kidnapped, on June 25, 2006. The handwritten records, kept in the Southern Brigade command center, show the first hours of confusion and the rapid shift from reports of explosions near Kerem Shalom to the realization that a soldier had been taken into Gaza.
The log entries reconstruct the timeline minute by minute. At 5:13 a.m., the first report mentioned many explosions in the Kerem Shalom area, initially believed to be artillery impacts. By 5:19 a.m., the wording changed to, “There are casualties,” and attack helicopters were ordered scrambled. At 6:40 a.m., the key breakthrough appeared in the operations room: “A soldier is missing from the tank.” Four minutes later, the command used the code word “Hannibal,” signaling a frantic effort to stop the abduction.
At 8:00 a.m., after reports of a vest and helmet found on the fence, the official identification was entered: “Name of the kidnapped soldier: Gilad Shalit.” Later entries show trackers finding footprints of both the abductors and the kidnapped soldier at 9:52 a.m., and at 1:38 p.m. a tracking officer reported finding Shalit’s vest with “traces of blood and shrapnel.”
The documents also capture uncertainty among commanders. In a midday assessment, one note said, “The soldier is probably alive... the attack is by Hamas... the attack has been underway for about 3 weeks.” Another line suggested he may no longer be in the southern sector and could be farther north. By evening, intelligence rumors circulated that he may have been moved through a tunnel into Egypt, though the log said the reliability of that claim was unclear. The archive says the notebooks offer a rare look at the operating-room confusion as commanders tried to understand the attack and prevent the hostage from being moved deeper into Gaza. Shalit was later held by Hamas for 1,941 days and freed on October 18, 2011, in a prisoner exchange.
