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STORY: Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit lands at Tel Nof air base in Israel on Tuesday, greeted by his family and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Sergeant Shalit, 25, and hundreds of Palestinians crossed Israel's borders in opposite directions on Tuesday as a thousand-for-one prisoner exchange brought joy to families but did little to ease decades of conflict.
Shalit returned home to a national outpouring of emotion in Israel after five years in captivity in the Gaza Strip. The first few hundred of over a thousand Palestinians being freed in stages from Israeli jails were greeted with kisses and flags in Gaza and the West Bank.
But there was no sign from Israel or Hamas, an Islamist group dedicated to its destruction, that the Egyptian-brokered deal could be a starting point for dialogue.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, welcoming Shalit home, warned the former prisoners they would be "taking their life into their own hands" if they "returned to terror."
Defending a deal that left a bittersweet aftertaste in Israel, Netanyahu said he felt the pain of the relatives of Israelis killed by some of the Palestinians released, but saving a soldier from captivity was a Jewish Biblical imperative.
Shalit was taken across the frontier from the Gaza Strip into Egypt's Sinai peninsula and driven to Israel's Kerem Shalom - Vineyard of Peace - border crossing, from where a helicopter flew him to an Israeli air base for a reunion with his parents.
Simultaneously Israel freed 477 Palestinian prisoners, most of them to the Gaza Strip and many serving life terms for attacks that killed Israelis. Hamas leaders greeted former prisoners piling off buses bearing Red Cross insignia.
