Twenty years ago, Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was kidnapped from a tank in a cross-border Hamas attack and dragged into Gaza — an abduction that would grip Israel for half a decade and shape the nation’s reckoning with the terror group ever since.

On Thursday, marking the twentieth anniversary of Shalit’s kidnapping, the Defense Ministry released never-before-seen military logs detailing the events of that fateful day. The logs consist of minute-by-minute records of reports received in an Israel Defense Forces command center regarding operations, handwritten in real time.

Much of the information in the logs released Thursday was already known, but the material paints a fuller picture of the confusion and fateful delays within the military’s ranks in the immediate aftermath of the cross-border abduction — a grim foreshadowing of October 7, 2023.

Shalit, a corporal, was deployed with three others inside Israel near the Gaza border early on the morning of June 25, 2006, when a Hamas cell that had infiltrated Israel via a cross-border tunnel ambushed their tank, killing Lt. Hanan Barak and Staff Sergeant Pavel Slutsker.

Shalit was lightly wounded in the attack and captured by the attackers, who took him into the Gaza Strip. He would languish there for nearly 2,000 days before being released in October 2011 in exchange for over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, including Yahya Sinwar, who would go on to lead Hamas and mastermind the October 7, 2023 attack.

The newly released log shows that the first report of an assault came at 5:13 a.m., noting numerous explosions heard in the area of the Kerem Shalom border community and an initial assessment that they were rocket impacts.

One minute later, at 5:14 a.m., the words “there are casualties” appear in the log.

This is followed by numerous entries documenting the deployment of forces and reports of terrorists infiltrating the area.

Nearly an hour and a half after the incident began, at 6:40 a.m., a report stating “soldier missing from tank” first appears.

Four minutes later, the codename “Hannibal” was entered into the operations log, referring to the IDF’s contentious........

© The Times of Israel