(ANSA) - JERUSALEM, SEPTEMBER 19 - The Israeli army (IDF) announced this morning the arrest of the last two of the six Palestinians who escaped almost two weeks from a prison in northern Israel.
The operation took place in Jenin, the northern sector of the occupied West Bank from which the six prisoners came.
On 6 September, six Palestinian prisoners imprisoned for anti-Israeli violence escaped from the high-security prison of Gilboa, through a tunnel dug under a sink and leading to a hole in the ground outside the penitentiary. The six fugitives, immediately qualified as "heroes" on the Palestinian side, had become the most sought after men in Israel, which had deployed Hedron military reinforcements to try to find them. The weekend following this escape, Israeli forces arrested four of the attackers in the area of Nazareth, an Arab city in northern Israel. The authorities had in particular arrested and then started to interrogate Mahmoud Ardah, a member of the Islamic Jihadis jailed since 1996 and considered the mastermind of the operation, and Zakaria al-Zoubeidi,former head of the armed wing of the Fatah party for the Palestinian camp of Jenin, a bulwark of the armed rebellion. Today the military announced the arrest in Jenin of the last two fugitives, AyhamKamamji, 35, and Munadel Infeiat, 26, both members of the Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian Islamist armed movement, during a joint operation with special anti-terrorism units. The two men "are currently being interrogated", they stressed in a short message to the press, without providing for the moment more details on this special operation in the stronghold of the six now ex-fugitives. Originally from Kafr Dan, near Jenin, Kamamji was arrested in 2006 and sentenced to life in prison for the kidnapping and murder of Eliahou Asheri, a young Israeli settler.Infeiat was arrested in 2020 and was awaiting sentencing after being jailed on several occasions in the past for his activities within Islamic Jihad. (HANDLE).