By

Marian Lebor

Opinion

Four years on, another World Cup - and Gilad Shalit is still in captivity

June 24, 2010 21:18
3 min read

Four years ago, most of us were doing exactly what we are doing right now: watching the World Cup and wondering whether England would progress to the quarter finals.

For Noam and Aviva Shalit and their family, Sunday 25 June 2006 will forever be the day that their nightmare began and their lives were put on hold.

I remember that summer so vividly.The kidnapping of Gilad Shalit set in motion the most terrible time. A little over two weeks later, the kidnapping of two more soldiers near the Lebanese border was the catalyst for the Second Lebanon War.

Four years on it's the 2010 World Cup, and the Shalit family's nightmare is still going on. Gilad Shalit has been held in captivity in Gaza, whereabouts unknown, since early that Sunday morning in 2006, when a Gazan terror cell launched a cross-border attack on an IDF post near Kibbutz Kerem Shalom in southern Israel. Lt. Hanan Barak from Arad and Sgt. Pavel Slocker from Dimona were killed in the attack.

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