Police: 6 Palestinians Escape from High-security Israeli Prison

Arab World

September 6th, 5:31am

Asharq Al-Awsat

Palestinian prisoners stand in a cell, pending their release from Ketziot prison in southern Israel, on October 1, 2007. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit/File)

Six Palestinians escaped from a high-security Israeli prison on Monday, police said, and Israeli media reports identified them as members of militant groups. The reports said five of the prisoners belonged to the Islamic Jihad movement and one was a former commander of an armed group affiliated with the mainstream Fatah party. According to the reports, the six were cell mates and tunneled out of Gilboa prison in northern Israel. "Overnight, we received a number of reports about suspicious figures in agricultural fields and from the prison service, which discovered very quickly that prisoners were missing from their cells and that six escaped," national police spokesman Eli Levy told Kan Radio. Security forces were searching for the men and believed they might try to reach the nearby West Bank, Israeli-occupied territory where the Palestinian Authority exercises limited self-rule, or the Jordanian border, Reuters quoted him as saying. Israeli media reports identified one of the escaped prisoners as Zakaria Zubeidi, a former commander of Fatah's Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in the West Bank city of Jenin.

from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3173206/police-6-palestinians-escape-high-security-israeli-prison