Palestinians pull off rare jailbreak
JERUSALEM — It was about 1:30 a.m. Monday when the first prisoner poked his head up through a hole in a dirt track in northeast Israel and hauled himself above ground.
Then came a second man, then a third. Within about 10 minutes, three more Palestinian prisoners had emerged from the hole, after improbably crawling nearly 32 yards from their cell inside Gilboa, one of Israel’s seven maximum-security jails.
The six militants have vanished in what prison officials say is the biggest Palestinian jailbreak in 23 years.
Against the backdrop of the Jewish new year celebrations, the escape prompted a still-fruitless manhunt across northern Israel and the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, involving hundreds of police officers and soldiers at dozens of roadblocks. The incident constitutes a rare humiliation of the Israeli security establishment and has provoked alarm about the security lapses that may have aided the fugitives’ escape.
And it has set off a cascade of rumor and humor, filling social media with memes comparing the escape to the plots of Hollywood movies, as well as unconfirmed hearsay about how the militants escaped.
What’s certain is that the six men left their shared cell by removing a small part of the floor of their communal shower cubicle, video released by the prison service showed. Then they lowered themselves into a subterranean cavity that extended beneath the prison and toward its perimeter, allowing them to evade 40 prison guards, three watchtowers, two walls, two barbed-wire fences and a pack of sniffer dogs, a spokesman for the prison service said.
At least part of their escape route was dug by the prisoners themselves, the spokesperson added, though military experts were still assessing the extent of their digging, how long they took, and the tools they used.
Surveillance cameras captured the men emerging from the hole in farmland southeast of the prison around 1:30 a.m., the spokesperson said.
Prison, police and military officials couldn’t confirm widely circulated reports that the fugitives dug their way to the surface using a spoon.
The six men were among about 5,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons after being convicted or accused of militant activity. Five are members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a militant Islamist group, the prison service said.
The sixth is the most widely known: Zakaria Zubeidi, a 45-yearold former commander in Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, an armed group loosely linked to Fatah, the secular political party that dominates Palestinian institutions in the West Bank.
Zubeidi became a prominent militant leader in the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, during the 2000s that left about 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis dead. He was accused of orchestrating several terrorist attacks on Israelis but was included in a general amnesty in 2007.
Zubeidi later renounced violence, turning instead to political theater and becoming a leader of the Freedom Theater in Jenin, his hometown in the northern West Bank.
But Israeli officials investigated him again in 2019, arresting him in recent West Bank attacks on Israeli settlers, including an attempted murder. He was being held in Gilboa pending a trial verdict.
Many Palestinians celebrated the breakout.
“The lack of freedom we experience as Palestinians is the reason why everyone got moved by this,” Zubeidi’s younger brother Yehia said by phone. “The whole thing has to do more with our demand for freedom than the actual escape operation.”