On September 5, six Palestinian prisoners held captive in an Israeli maximum prison –the Gilboa prison - broke out in speculator fashion. The men had dug a hole in the floor of their cell, then crawled through a cavity and tunneled their way beneath the outer wall.
The men are believed to have made their way out of the cell they shared by digging a hole in the floor of their bathroom. The Jerusalem Post reported that they had used a spoon which they hid behind a poster, as the tool to dig their way out. The jailbreak shocked Israel and its security establishment, which boasts its maximum-security prisons are unbreakable.
In Palestine, where millions have been displaced by numerous wars waged by Israel, live in refugee camps while thousands of othershave died as a result of the fighting and many others rot in Israeli jails, the prison escapees are looked on as political prisoners/prisoners of conscience and are being hailed as heroes.
Israel holds some 4,750 Palestinians across dozens of prison facilities, including 42 females, 200 children, and 550 administrative detainees, according to the prisoners’ rights group Addameer.
Qadura Fares, head of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, described the daring escape as a victory against the Israeli security system.
“We are happy with this escape. We have called for the necessity of liberating all Palestinian prisoners. If the prisoners can free themselves, this is a great thing,” Fares, who spent 18 years in prison, told Al Jazeera.
The six escapees, according to the BBC included Zakaria Zubeidi, a former commander of the Palestinian militant group Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade in the West Bank city of Jenin, as well as five members of Islamic Jihad. Four of the Islamic Jihad members were serving life sentences, while the fifth had been held without charge for two years under a so-called administrative detention order.
The administrative detention order is very much like our own Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). Under the PTA a suspect may be held in custody at the whim of the authorities over long periods of time without charges being framed.
Recently, a sitting Cabinet Minister - the son of a past President - who was held in custody during the past regime, revealed in parliament that some of the Tamil prisoners being held under PTA regulations had been in custody, for over 25-years without charges being filed against them. The Minister called for the prisoners to be charged or released.
According to media reports, at least four of the Palestinian escapees were serving life imprisonment and had been in custody for over two years. In their own minds and in reality, they had no hope of release, given the Israeli judicial system which is heavily weighted against Palestinians.
With a lifetime of imprisonment staring them in the face, imprisoned Palestinians with time on their hands have begun devising ingenious long-term methods to secure their freedom, such as using simple tools like a spoon to tunnel their way to freedom! It took eight months of continuous day-and-night digging for the escapees to get out of prison.
But free themselves they did. Taken together with the recent Israeli-Palestinian war in the Gaza, where for the first time Israeli citizens had to run for cover from shells fired by Gaza’s ruling party –Hamas’- pierced the complacency of Israel, its leaders thought they had brought the Palestinians to heel and removed them as an obstacle to their expansionist programmes.
As Hamas spokesperson, Fawzi Barhoum put it, the escape showed “that the struggle for freedom with the occupier is continuous and extended, inside prisons and outside to extract this right”.
After five days, four of the prisoners were captured. Speaking after his capture Zakaria Zubaid according to sources within Fatah said the recapture did not matter… we enjoyed five days of complete freedom, we walked freely in our land, spoke to our brothers, ate the fruit of our land and drank its waters. We are satisfied. We have shown whatever the odds we can achieve the goals and our land will soon be free.
Writing in the aftermath of the May ’21 war in Gaza, the ‘International Crisis Group’ put it succinctly, warning the bankruptcy of a political strategy that entailed fragmenting the West Bank, encircling East Jerusalem from without and settling it with Jews from within, plus fighting Hamas in Gaza every few years, has failed.
For there to be peace, Israel has to revert to its original borders as set forth in the partition plan of 1947. It also needs to face the deep rifts within its own society caused by institutionalized discrimination against its Palestinian citizens.
