Gilad Shalit

The First Post has this editorial:

Not for the first time, the issue of an abducted Israeli soldier has moved centre stage in the complicated search for peace between Arabs and Jews. This time, the soldier concerned is Gilad Shalit, a corporal seized by Hamas militants in 2006 at the age of 19, and held in a Hamas prison ever since.

Yesterday, when Barack Obama's Middle East envoy George Mitchell arrived in Jerusalem to discuss the Gaza ceasefire, the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made it clear his country would not allow the reopening of Gaza's border crossings with Israel - in line with the 2005 agreement brokered by Condoleezza Rice - until Shalit has been released.

Because of the closure of the border crossings for the past 18 months, Gazans have resorted to digging more smuggling tunnels under the southern border with Egypt.

According to a report from Donald Macintyre in Gaza City for the Independent, Israel's argument is that the 2005 agreement was made not with Hamas but with the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas. If the crossings are to reopen, Israel wants the Ramallah-based authority to control the Gazan side of the crossings, rather than Hamas.

Olmert is understood to believe that Hamas has been sufficiently weakened by Israel's 22-day offensive that the eventual return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza is now feasible "in one form or another".

The big question now is whether the release of Gilad Shalit can be negotiated with Hamas - probably in exchange for Palestinian prisoners - and whether he is even still alive. The French claim to have the answer to that. The Shalit family holds dual French-Israeli citizenship and French diplomats have been monitoring the Shalit situation via Syria.

According to Gilad's father, Noam Shalit, speaking yesterday to the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz from France, President Nicolas Sarkozy has personally confirmed that Gilad is alive. Sarkozy apparently told Shalit he had been assured of his son's safety after speaking personally with Syria's President Bashar Assad and with two French politicians who had traveled to Damascus and met the Hamas political chief, Khaled Meshal.

Gilad's mother, Aviva Shalit, also spoke to the press on Wednesday - and her emotional comments reveal why her son's release is such a political hot potato in Israel.

"I want to be hugging Gilad when I go to cast my vote," she said, referring to the upcoming general election on February 10 when the Kadima party - with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni replacing the departing Olmert as leader - and Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party fight for control of the Knesset.

For Aviva Shalit, whose boy has been "rotting away" in a Hamas prison for 948 days, the issue is very simple - in not bringing Gilad home, Olmert's party has broken what she calls "the pact between the state and the mothers".

She said: "The State's commitment has been unshakeable throughout the years. the unspoken covenant between the military and the mothers was carved in stone. We give you our sons and daughters to serve ¬ you return them to us. Not always in one piece, not always sound and too often dead; but they always, always come home."

As Seth Freedman explained in an article for The First Post at the beginning of the Gaza offensive, "Israel values the lives of its soldiers so much that they routinely swap hundreds, even thousands, of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for a few captured soldiers, or even simply for the body parts of troops killed in battle and subsequently held by the enemy."