Kidnapped Israeli Soldier's Father Full of Worry

July 16, 2006 — -- In the Middle East, it has taken just three weeks to go from status quo to full-fledged crisis, and the trigger was the kidnapping of three Israeli soldiers.

In Israel, a country that experiences so much violence in so many forms, the kidnapping of troops strikes a special chord.

Gilad Shalit, 19, was the first of the soldiers taken, kidnapped three weeks ago by Hamas along the Gaza Strip.

"I'm trying to be optimistic," his father said, "but I don't have any solid reasons to be optimistic until now. It's hard."

Shalit says he is trying to picture where his son is and how he is doing.

"I am trying to imagine but I have no idea in what condition he's kept and where he's kept," Shalit said. "How do they treat him? Is he well? Is he in good health? Is he wounded?"

Gilad Shalit's case has provoked an enormous wave of sympathy here, because in Israel everyone -- male and female, with almost no exceptions -- has to do military service. So every parent has a child who is, was or will be in the army, and they can all taste his father's pain.

"We feel like it happened to us, personally," said Yo'av Ben Nun.

"When something like this happens we feel that this could be us," Avi Zamir said.

But Noam Shalit says they will never really know how he feels.

"You can never reach my, our position until you go there," he said. "I hope there will not be any more of these cases. But you cannot imagine this suffering until you reach our position."