Shalit's father Noam, with a picture of his son, missing for over three years

An Israeli soldier captured by Gaza-based militants more than three years ago is in good health, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said on Tuesday, adding that he hoped he would soon be freed.

“I believe (Gilad) Shalit is fine,” said Mubarak, whose intelligence chief Omar Suleiman has been mediating negotiations aimed at a securing prisoner exchange between Israel and the Palestinian militants holding the soldier.

“I hope the issue will end soon,” Mubarak told journalists after talks in Cairo with visiting Israeli President Shimon Peres.

Then a 19-year-old corporal, Shalit was captured by militants from Hamas and two smaller groups who had tunnelled out of Gaza on June 25, 2006 and attacked an army post, killing two other soldiers.

Shalit, who has since been promoted to staff sergeant, is believed to be held somewhere inside the Gaza Strip, which has been run by Hamas since the Islamist movement seized power in the Palestinian enclave two years ago.

Israel and Hamas have held months of indirect talks through Egyptian mediators on a prisoner swap that would see hundreds of Palestinian detainees set free in exchange for Shalit, but no deal has been struck.

Let’s hope for the sake of his family Gilad Shalit really is ‘fine’ and released soon (if anyone can be fine after being kidnapped by violent fanatics and held for captive for years).

We’d rather have him reunited with them than not, but deplore the likely circus that will inevitably surround his release should it happen; where it is likely that everyone from Khaled Meshaal to Mubarak and Obama will no doubt be falling over themselves to pose for photo-opportunities and attempting to cover themselves in cheap glory.

The fact is that he remains in captivity with HAMAS, the criminal terrorists that run the Gaza Strip and who inculcate the children of ‘Palestine’ to believe that Jews are the ‘children of apes and pigs’.

[Main story: AFP]

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