Israel captures four of six Palestinian prisoners escaped through tunnel

Two of the escaped prisoners detained by the police on Saturday in the outskirts of Nazareth.HO / AP

The Israeli security forces have captured four of the six Palestinian prisoners, several of them sentenced to life for terrorism, who escaped Monday through a tunnel of the maximum security prison in Gilboa, northeast Israel. Two of the escapees were arrested on Friday night in the Nazareth area, north of the jail, and the other two were arrested this Saturday in a parking lot in an Arab town near Nazareth. A large police and military deployment has been launched during the New Year (Tuesday and Wednesday) and Jewish Sabbath festivities following the unprecedented fiasco caused by the security breach. The mobilization is still active to pursue the two remaining fugitives. While Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem have celebrated the evasion,the Israeli Government has opened an investigation into the flaws detected in the Prison Service.

Those arrested on Friday are two members of the armed group Islamic Jihad, considered the instigator of the evasion, according to France Presse. Police say they received a tip that the first two suspects had been seen in Nazareth. On Saturday morning Zakaria al Zubeidi, a militant leader of the Fatah party, and another Islamic Jihad affiliate were also captured in a parking lot in Shibli Umm al Ghanam, east of Nazareth.

Israel's strict prison system, one of the safest in the world, has seen its reputation seriously damaged by evasion. The police and the Army launched a spectacular search with special forces and tracking dogs, with the support of drones and helicopters, to prevent them from crossing the border of the occupied territory of the West Bank or neighboring Jordan. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called the leak a "serious incident", and the prison department acknowledged that there had been "a serious intelligence failure."

Within hours of the start of the Jewish New Year holidays, the number of staff had been reduced on Monday at the maximum security prison in Gilboa, about three miles from the West Bank and about 15 miles from the Jordanian border. In a count of inmates carried out early in the morning, the alarm went off in the second module of the penitentiary. The six inmates were not in the cell they shared. An emergency search shortly afterwards discovered where they had fled.

They drilled the ground under the cell service sink to access the drainage galleries system, before reaching the sewer network of the second module, close to the wall that surrounds the center. They then reached the outside of the prison through a tunnel dug under the concrete walls that surround the complex, at the foot of an observation tower that was unguarded at the time.

The best known of the escapees, Zubeidi, was head of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades (an armed wing of the Fatah party) in Jenin (northern West Bank), and was sentenced to life, among other causes, for an attack against a headquarters of the Israeli Likud party in which eight people were killed in 2002, during the Second Intifada.

Zubeidi was granted amnesty, but was arrested again in 2019 in connection with a spate of shootings.

The other five escapees are members of the Islamic Jihad and also from Jenin.

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Gilboa Prison was built in 2004 as a maximum security center for prisoners convicted of terrorism.

Presumably, the escapees had a mobile phone to coordinate with collaborators abroad.

In the city of Jenin, a focus of Palestinian armed resistance to the Israeli occupation, shots were heard in the air with joy and Palestinian factions celebrated the escape of the prisoners.

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