“I’ll be very frank. Currently we don’t know where he is,” an Israeli military official said speaking on the condition of anonymity under military protocol. “Unless we see hard evidence that he is alive, or hard evidence that he is dead, or hard evidence that he is in the hands of Hamas, we simply say that he is missing.”

Image Sgt. Oron Shaul of the Israeli Army. Credit... Reuters

Capturing an Israeli soldier — or even withholding a soldier’s remains — can have a powerful impact on Israeli society, more in some ways than death. Israel in the past has traded the freedom of hundreds of prisoners in exchange not just for the living — like Gilad Shalit, who was held from 2006 to 2011 before Israel negotiated a trade for his release — but also for the corpses of soldiers who died in battle.

Hamas has recognized the pull such incidents have over the Israeli psyche and clearly has moved to grab hostages. When militants were killed infiltrating Israel through tunnels recently, one group was found carrying plastic handcuffs and a tranquilizer, according to the Israeli military.

The fight in Shejaiya was the deadliest engagement for Israeli forces since their ground incursion into Gaza began last Thursday, after 10 days of aerial bombardment in a campaign Israel says is aimed at quelling rocket fire from Gaza and destroying Hamas’s tunnel network. Afterward, Hamas’s military wing said it had captured Sergeant Shaul, and it gave his serial number. Celebrations immediately broke out in Gaza and the West Bank.

In Israel, the initial belief was that Sergeant Shaul was killed in the attack, but there was some confusion about the casualties. It took the military about nine hours to confirm publicly that 13 soldiers were killed in the battle in Shejaiya, and even longer to release their names. In all, at least 27 Israeli soldiers have been killed since the beginning of the ground invasion.