Noam Shalit will be remembered for his strength and relentless fight for son’s freedom

When Noam Shalit first learned that his son, Gilad, had disappeared, his thoughts turned to his own father. Shalit’s twin brother, Yoel, went missing in the Golan Heights in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War. Their father immediately set off for the war- battered plateau to search for Yoel, who was 19, the same age as Gilad when Hamas terrorists kidnapped him in in 2006 during a cross-border raid.

Yoel was eventually identified among the dead. The fear that Gilad, an introverted basketball fan, might share the same fate drove Shalit to shed his natural inclination for privacy, and to become the face of a campaign to reclaim his son, culminating in a prisoner exchange in 2011.

“It was like being thrown over 30 years backwards,” Shalit told The New York Times just months after he launched the campaign to free Gilad.

Shalit died last Wednesday, aged 68, exactly 13 years after moving with his wife into a tent outside the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem to call attention to his son’s captivity. He was suffering from leukemia, Israeli news site Ynet reported.

Benny Gantz, the defence minister, who was military chief in 2011 and helped negotiate Gilad’s release in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian security prisoners, said in his condolences Shalit “never once gave up the hope he would see his son again”.

Shalit “never once gave up the hope he would see his son again

His son’s capture forced Shalit to become the public face of a movement. His fierce paternal love throbbed through his calm demeanour, and he earned the devotion of Israeli parents.

“Gilad Shalit is a national trauma,” Sima Kadmon, a Yedioth Ahronoth columnist, wrote in 2010. “He is the symbol of our powerlessness. Of the fact that the Israel Defense Forces cannot solve everything and of the fact that not everything can be fixed by force and, perhaps, of the fact that not everything can always be resolved.”

“He is the symbol of our powerlessness. Of the fact that the Israel Defense Forces cannot solve everything and of the fact that not everything can be fixed by force and, perhaps, of the fact that not everything can always be resolved.

Previous massive exchanges of a handful of Israeli prisoners or corpses for thousands of suspected terrorists had come to be seen as a bad deal: sometimes, the terrorists went back to work almost immediately upon being freed.

But it was hard to resist Shalit’s steady campaign. Posters of Gilad in a uniform, thin, boyish and awkward, plastered the country’s public spaces. Shalit appealed directly to Palestinians. He offered Hamas to become a hostage to release his son. In 2010, Shalit led a march from his village in Israel’s north to Jerusalem. “We won’t wait any longer in our home,” he said, setting out.

In 2010, Shalit led a march from his village in Israel’s north to Jerusalem. “We won’t wait any longer in our home,

“I believe that in principle negotiations should not be held with terror organisations,” Yaacov Amidror, a general in the Israeli reserves, said at the time, but  Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu eventually made the trade. Victims of the terrorists among those freed shed tears of frustration upon their release, but scenes of Gilad and his father reuniting overwhelmed the news, and polls showed Israelis supported the terms of the release.

Noam Shalit tarried for a while in the limelight, contemplating a run for Knesset in 2012 on the Labor Party ticket – his experience with his son nurtured a contempt for hard lines, and he said he would talk to Hamas to make peace.

Soon, however, the family returned to privacy. If Shalit made a public appearance, it was to thank supporters.

In 2020, Gilad and his fiancée, Nitzan Shabbat, announced they were engaged; the photo of the robust, intensely happy couple who married one year later was their one concession to a public that wondered what happened to the bespectacled boy who had disappeared from view.