Marking 20 years since the abduction of Gilad Shalit, the Israel Defense Forces Archive at the Defense Ministry has published the operational logs from the day he was captured. The newly released documents from the Southern Brigade command post in the Gaza Division reconstruct, minute by minute, the reports from the tank hit, the shooting in the sector, the military’s “green in the eyes” procedure on the ground, and the realization that Staff Sgt. Gilad Shalit had been taken hostage on the morning of June 25, 2006.
According to the logs, a Palestinian terror cell infiltrated from the Gaza Strip through a tunnel and attacked an armored force from Battalion 71 of the 188th Brigade. Two IDF soldiers were killed in the battle and others were wounded, while the attackers exploited the chaos to abduct Shalit and bring him back into Gaza. The first entry, at 05:13, reported multiple explosions near Kerem Shalom and assumed they were impacts. One minute later, the log already noted “there are casualties” and requests were sent to scramble attack helicopters. The records then show reinforcements being deployed, including the Kerem Shalom standby squad, and the identification of infiltrators, described in military jargon as a “Turkish horse.”
By 05:20, the situation update included entries such as “terrorists crossed the fence,” “impacts on the fence,” “dead at Panther,” and “full alert in camp.” At 06:34, the operations room received casualty reports saying two of their dead had been evacuated from the tank, two wounded were still inside it, and another injured soldier was being removed. Only at 06:40 did the first note appear that a soldier was missing from the tank, and four minutes later the code word “Hannibal” was entered. At 06:57, the log said, “Three reached the tank, the whereabouts of all the terrorists are unknown. Two terrorists were killed, eight infiltrated.”
By 07:12, troops had found a vest and helmet on the fence, and at 07:46 the log stated that no dragging marks were found, but the vest and helmet were located on the fence. At 08:00, the hostage was officially identified as Gilad Shalit, alongside the names of the two fallen soldiers from the tank, Lt. Hanan Barak and Sgt. Pavel Slutsker. Later entries noted footprints of both the terrorists and the abducted soldier, and that the hostage’s vest had blood and shrapnel marks. By the afternoon, officers assessed that Shalit was probably alive, though his location was unknown. One later rumor, that he had been taken through a tunnel to Egypt, was also logged but marked as unverified.
The archive says the handwritten records show the moment the Gaza Division and Southern Brigade understood that an IDF soldier had been abducted, amid confusion and efforts to locate him in real time. Shalit, now 39, was held in Gaza for five years and four months and was freed on October 18, 2011, in a deal with Hamas that saw Israel release 1,027 prisoners, including some convicted of murder.
