Woodkirk Stone
JERUSALEM – Israel on Sunday captured the last of six Palestinian detainees who escaped from a maximum security prison nearly two weeks ago, ending an episode the Israelis saw as a humiliation of their security establishment and that the Palestinians celebrated as a rare black eye for the Israeli occupation.
The IDF said in a statement that it captured Munadil Nafayat and Eham Kamamji in Jenin, their hometown in the occupied West Bank, in an early morning operation jointly with a special forces unit of the police and the agency. Israeli internal intelligence agency, the Shin Pari.
Of the six prisoners who escaped from Gilboa prison in northern Israel on September 6, Mr. Nafayat and Mr. Kamamji were the only ones who managed to reach the West Bank. The other four were captured in northern Israel over a week ago.
The six escaped their shared cell after removing some of the floor from their shower stall and crawling nearly 32 meters below the prison, partly through a pre-existing cavity that stretched from under the cell to the perimeter from prison.
The breakout, Israel’s largest escape in more than 20 years, sparked an uproar. The relative ease with which several men convicted of terrorist offenses had buried themselves at liberty was seen as a damning indictment of the prison system, its security procedures and its intelligence-gathering capabilities.
But for many Palestinians, who view the fugitives as resistance fighters against 54 years of occupation, the escape from prison was an act of heroism that lifts their spirits. Palestinian social media users circulated doctored images of the arrests of the fugitives, turning their faces into smiles to portray them as triumphant even at the time of their capture.
In a statement, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett hailed the security forces for “an impressive, sophisticated and swift operation.” He added: “What has gone wrong can be fixed.”
Mr. Nafayat and Mr. Kamamji were arrested unarmed in a safe house after coming out with their hands in the air, according to a report by Kan, Israel’s main state-funded news broadcaster. Mr. Kamamji’s father, Fuad, told Kan that his son called him out of the blue around 2 a.m., saying that his arrest was imminent and that he was about to surrender.
Five of the six fugitives, including Mr. Kamamji and Mr. Nafayat, were members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an extremist Islamist group that has carried out dozens of attacks on Israeli civilians since the 1980s, killing hundreds. He regularly joins Hamas, the largest militant group ruling the Gaza Strip, to fire unguided rockets at Israeli towns, a war crime under international law.
Mr. Kamamji was serving a life sentence for the kidnapping and murder of an Israeli teenager, Eliyahu Asheri, while Mr. Nafayat has been in jail awaiting trial since 2020.
The most famous of the six, Zakaria Zubeidi, became well known during the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, in the 2000s, when he was a senior commander of the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a militant group loosely affiliated with the Fatah, the secular group that dominates Palestinian politics in the occupied West Bank.
He was one of nearly 200 activists amnestied by Israel in 2007, and then turned to political theater, which he said was a more effective means of resistance than violence.
But in 2019, Mr. Zubeidi was arrested again by Israel. He is currently on trial on charges of participating in the shooting of Israeli settlers in the West Bank, among other charges.
About 5,000 Palestinians are held in Israeli jails. For many Palestinians, their plight is synonymous with the daily experience of the occupation; many know someone who is either a prisoner of the Israeli security forces or has been.
Israeli media coverage of the escape focused on the security dangers posed by the fugitives, the blunders that may have led to their escape, and speculation about the influence some prisoners might have with the prison authorities. Analysts asked why the six men – all from the Jenin region, about 10 miles south of the prison – had been incarcerated so close to their hometown and whether this proximity could have enabled support networks that made it possible their escape.
Other perceived errors included the decision to house the six men in the same cell, even though three of them had been formally designated as likely to attempt to escape; posting of a prison floor plan on the website of an architectural firm; and the failure of the prison authorities to use a jamming device that would have prevented inmates from communicating with the outside world on cell phones smuggled into the prison.
Omer Bar Lev, the government minister who oversees the prison service, admitted failings had occurred and said there would be an independent investigation into what went wrong.
Myra Noveck contributed reporting.