After two weeks, the prisoner escape that kept Israel in its ban came to an end with the capture in Jenin, on the Occupied West Bank of the last two escapees. Four others were caught within days of their escape and returned to their cell. The story of their escape fired the imagination of many. Digging a tunnel from their cell, and escaping through a hole outside the prison wall reminds of famous prisoner escapes both from real-life as well as movies and books. And the enthusiasm over the daring escape clouded the simple grim facts about why these six Palestinians were in jail in the first place: they killed innocent civilians in the terrorist attacks they planned and executed and they are nothing more than murderers.
But, when looking more in-depth at the whole story of their escape, there are many things that make you wonder. Wonder how it could have happened and wonder how it ended.
Let’s look at how it happened.
The Gilboa prison is a high-security prison that was designed and built to hold security prisoners and is considered one of the most secured prisons in Israel. Yet, a group of ten prisoners spent months digging an escape tunnel starting from the floor of their shower without the authorities knowing or noticing. Dirt, that was thrown in the sewage system (through the toilets) caused clogging and several times in the past year the system needed to be cleaned out, something that apparently did not arouse the suspicion of the prison management. It appears that the diggers got a lot of the information on where and how to dig, because the blueprints of the prison were available on the internet, for anyone and everyone to see and study. This gave them insight into the structure of the prison walls, showing them that right under their cell floor, open spaces are left that would enable easy escape with only a short tunnel to be dough to reach outside of the walls of the prison. And, to top it all off, apparently the guard in the tower right next to the escape tunnel had fallen sleep.
While all this was happening under their noses, the prison management had no clue, apparently because they didn’t bother to look for any clues. Already shortly after the opening of the prison, a (foiled) escape attempt was made, this time by finding the underground pathway through the floor of the toilet in their cell. At the time, the floor was replaced by concrete slabs, but why did nobody bother to look any further? The day before the escape, one of the escapees, Zakaria Zubeidi, the most notorious of the six, requested to be transferred to the escape cell and nobody stopped him. None of the signs that should have aroused suspicion caused any action by the prison management and even a system to block cellular phones was not activated.
Is the Israeli prison system really in such a pitiful state? Or is the prison authority continuously attempting to prevent unrest in the prisons, which may quickly deteriorate into unrest in the Territories as well? Do they get orders from the political world to “go easy” on the prisoners? Or maybe, as has been suggested in Israeli media, the disease of political appointments has resulted in such poor management that they simply had no clue how to control and manage a High-security prison.
But the reactions to the escape from the Palestinian side are no less surprising. While official media outlets of course praised the break-out and called the six escapees the heroes of the resistance, there appeared to have been very little help on the ground for them and they were seen running through the fields to get away since apparently nobody was waiting for them. In all the preparations for the escape, no arrangements were or could be made to pick them up after they came out of their tunnel and transport them as quickly as possible to a safe haven, such as Jordan? Fact is that no Palestinians came to their aid and the Israeli Arabs they encountered refused to help them and even alerted the police. In the end, after five days, four of the escapees, (who had split up into three groups of two) were found helpless, hungry and thirsty and were an easy catch for Israeli security forces. In the days before their capture they were spotted rummaging through garbage bins looking for food and requesting help from Israelis, who refused them. The last two were caught yesterday in Jenin without too much effort, as if they also were glad that this ordeal was finally over.
All in all, a very strange episode, which on one hand exposed the incompetence, the failures and the stupidity of the Israeli prison system which will likely take years to correct, if there is the will to correct them at all, since politics will surely intervene in this story before it will have an ending.
A first sign of this has been the increasingly loud voices to reexamine the conditions that the prisoners live in. And don’t be fooled, nobody is worried that the conditions are too harsh or restrictive and that improvement of the imprisonment conditions would improve the stability in the prison. The main concern is that the life of the prisoners is too easy, too comfortable. They are allowed too many things, have too many privileges and are more treated like guests than as prisoners.
While the UN (the High Commissioner for Human Rights) already in 1990 adopted: “Basic Principles for the Treatment of Prisoners”, it doesn’t appear any of the politicians had this in mind when they talked about prison conditions. It is to be hoped that Israel will do all it can to conform to the UN principles and not use the “luxurious” conditions as an excuse for the failures of the system that allowed this to happen.
In the end, one may be, and should be pleased that the six escapees were caught and are back where they belong, no matter how romantic an escape through a dug tunnel may be, they still are terrorists who killed people and likely will do it again if given a chance. And the politicians had better stay away from hateful revenge through for instance the prison conditions but maybe concentrate more on creating a new reality whereby terrorists and terrorism do no longer have a raison-d’etre, because justice is done between peoples without having to resort to violence.
I hope you found this article interesting and I welcome any comments you may have.
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