Six Palestinians escape from high-security Israeli prison
Escapees — four with life terms — dig tunnel from cell toilet floor to outside the jail walls
Six Palestinians broke out of a high-security Israeli prison yesterday in what Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called a grave incident.
Israeli officials said that the prisoners — four of whom were serving life sentences — escaped through a tunnel from the Gilboa prison, just north of the West Bank. They appeared to have dug the tunnel from a cell’s toilet floor
A photo showed a narrow hole in the floor of a cell, and Israeli security forces and journalists could be seen examining a similar hole just outside the prison walls.
It appeared to be the biggest Palestinian escape from an Israeli prison since 1987, when six militants from the Islamic Jihad group broke out of a heavily guarded prison in Gaza.
Israeli media quoted Public Security Minister Omer Barlev as saying that extensive planning
went into the escape and that the prisoners likely had “outside assistance”. They are believed to have used smuggled cellphones and may have arranged for a getaway vehicle.
Who are the prisoners?
The most well-known is Zakaria Zubeidi, 46, who was a prominent leader in the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in 2000-05. He was later granted amnesty along with other Fatah-affiliated militants, but was arrested again in 2019.
The other five were members
of Islamic Jihad. Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman, said the escape shows “that the struggle for freedom from the occupier is continuous and extended, inside prisons and outside”.
Even Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party praised the escape, with an official Twitter account posting a picture of Zubeidi and hailing what it called the “freedom tunnel”.