The escape from Gilboa Prison becomes, as expected, a strategic event. What started as a terrible and inconceivable malfunction of the prison services, threatens to ignite all security prisons, and even undermine security stability in Judea and Samaria, Gaza and possibly the cities involved. The full responsibility for the failure rests on the IPS. His list of faults is embarrassingly long: the fact that he did not know about the problematic structure of the prison; The permit he gave to high-risk prisoners to live together, despite their shared past digging a tunnel in the same prison a few years ago; Lack of intelligence on plans, excavation and execution; The fall of a warden; The delay from the moment the initial information arrives from the police about suspicious figures seen in the prison space, and then the difficulty in an elementary count of the prisoners; The permission given to Zechariah Zabeidi to cross a cell; Placing prisoners in a prison located in their area of residence and failing to observe frequent changes in the composition of cells and wings; The lack of elementary experience of commanders and intelligence officers in their work; And above all - not taking responsibility.
The latter indicates a rotten organizational culture, and a crooked understanding of reality.
Retired Rabbi Gondar Orit Adato was wrong when she said in a holiday television interview that the current commissioner, Katie Perry, should not resign because she is not resigning for an operational event.
This is not an operational incident, but a resounding, negligent malfunction, which indicates a deep decay in the IPS. Decay that requires a comprehensive system robbery.
The prisons are outdated and crowded, and the manpower in them is far from fit for the task.
Worse, those in control of the security prisons are the prisoners, not the state.
This is a malfunction that requires repair, and now is the time to do so.
If violence does break out - and the working premise should be yes - Israel must act to immediately differentiate between the arenas, and to maintain calm in the cities involved. This is a major lesson from Operation The Guardian of the Walls, and a top priority, also to make the escape farce from Gilboa Prison a negative lesson for anyone who has fun with similar ideas in the future.
Despite the fear of riots (which have already begun) in the prisons, and despite the fear of affecting the general security situation, it is time to put the prisons in order and return control to Israeli hands. The autonomy enjoyed by security prisoners is an illusory anomaly: from cell phones used to coordinate terrorist attacks, through the determination of cell and wing composition, to a free hand in food preparation and distribution. A real Prison Resort, which quite a few ministers of internal security wanted to fix, and withdrew. This move should be made by a government decision as early as this morning, in parallel with the hunt for the fleeing terrorists. Six people are needed for assistants, food and hiding places to survive, and all this produces quite a bit of intelligence. The high control of the security forces on the ground - combined with advanced technological capabilities - should make their chances of escaping over time slim. Still, the defense establishment is required to make sure that they do not escape to Jordan, where they will be granted immunity. It is precisely escapes to the territories that will facilitate their capture,And will also reduce the danger (which seems marginal at the moment) that they will try to harm Israeli citizens. It should be borne in mind that their capture would provoke a certain amount of violence in the territories - especially in Jenin - certainly if any of them were killed during the arrest.
In such a situation, Islamic Jihad, which includes five of the six fugitives, could launch rockets from Gaza as a sign of solidarity. Air defense systems have already been put on high alert, but Israel must make it clear to Hamas that such songs will be met with harsh response. It must also convey similar messages to the Palestinian Authority. Although the PA will not be able to speak freely on the issue because the prisoner case is in full consensus on the Palestinian street, it also has an interest in maintaining silence for fear that possible violence will be directed against it, certainly in Jenin - which also has quite a few buds of anarchy.