Ten years after Gilad Schalit was released from captivity by Hamas, he spoke about the time he was held by the terror group in the Gaza Strip, saying that the group wanted to keep him alive since the value of a dead soldier was far less than a living one.
“A living soldier, his value is different from that of a dead soldier. It was important for them to keep me alive,” he said during a talk with Holocaust survivors. While he was afraid that his health might deteriorate, he said: “I was not sick. I was very thin, even now I am thin but I was a little thinner.”
“All in all, as an organization, Hamas wanted to keep me in good shape, in good physical condition,” he said.
The meeting between Schalit and the group was aired on N12 on Friday night.
Schalit was kidnapped on June 25, 2006, when the tank he was serving in along the Gaza Strip was attacked by Hamas terrorists who infiltrated the Israeli side of the border through a tunnel they dug near the Kerem Shalom crossing.
The tank’s commander, Lt. Hanan Barak, as well as the other soldier in the tank, St.-Sgt. Pavel Slutsker, were killed and one other soldier was wounded. Schalit was abducted and brought back to the Strip, where he was held until a prisoner exchange deal was agreed upon.
He was handed back to Israel in a deal brokered by German and Egyptian mediators on October 18, 2011, five years after he was abducted, in exchange for 1,027 Palestinians held in Israeli jails.
Schalit, who rarely speaks to the media, told the group that while he was being held, “the country gave me hope,” despite having a “certain pessimism and a lot of uncertainty” about being released “because it was impossible to know how it would end.”
During his five years as a Hamas hostage, the group kept him in one location and moved him to a different location only a few times. He said he was unaware of the efforts to free him until later in his captivity when he listened to Israeli media on the radio.
“I had a hard time hearing it, because all the negotiations would end in disappointment, so it was very discouraging to hear it.”
Schalit told the survivors that in retrospect, one of the qualities that he developed while in captivity was individualism and how to be alone.
“You have to be with yourself all the time, and not break down. That might be what helped me. In the past [before his abduction] I was not the most sociable person who was surrounded by a lot of friends and a big family. Maybe that’s what helped me.”
He was told about his release a week before it happened, and now 10 years later, he’s newly married and “leads a normal life.”
“As you can see, I’m in good shape,” he said. Though he said he is in treatment and that there was a difficult period. “I went through these past years relatively peacefully, and overall I have recovered.”
Hamas currently holds the bodies of two IDF soldiers killed in the 2014 war, Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul, as well as two Israeli civilians believed to be alive – Hisham al-Sayed and Avera Mengistu.
On Friday, Hamas politburo member Moussa Abu Marzouk told the London-based Al-Araby Al-Jadeed that there has been a “fundamental development” and that a prisoner exchange can be “ready within weeks if the occupation responds to the movement’s demands.”
Israel and Hamas have been holding indirect talks about a prisoner exchange via Egypt.