האם בריחת האסירים הפלסטינים מכלא גלבוע הייתה מבויימת? כך טוען מקור ישראלי?
An Israeli source has conveyed to me an alternative narrative about the Palestinian Great Prison Escape which, if true, discounts the hero narrative portrayed among Palestinians. According to original story, six security detainees imprisoned for major terror attacks spent months digging an tunnel from their cell outside the prison from which they made a daring escape. In a plot worthy of a Hollywood movie, they allegedly used spoons and a plate to dig laboriously through earth and rock till they reached their goal. Once outside, four of them managed to remain at large for almost a week, while the remaining two weren’t captured till yesterday, spending nearly two weeks on the run.
Their daring prison break fired the imagination of Palestinians both in Israel, but especially in the Occupied Territories. Life under Israeli Occupation is desperately glum. Often resistance appears futile. Israeli security forces stomp their jack boots on Palestinians with routine night time raids filled with screams, crashing doors, homes smashed and family members disappeared under cover of darkness. This act of defiance offered Palestinians a break from this dreary routine. A story of resistance in the face of impossible odds.
Even more appealing, was the apparent ineptitude of Israeli prison authorities who were completely unaware of the covert operation happening under their noses. In addition. a prison guard was purportedly asleep in a watch tower facing the area from which the escapees emerged outside the prison wall. All of Jewish Israel was mesmerized and mortified by the incident. How could this happen? How could a country steeped in security allow dangerous terrorists to run amok in their very midst? There were reports also that these prisoners, who’d participated in earlier terror attacks, would plan new ones while on the lam.
As they watched the consternation with which Jewish Israelis faced the escape, and the many days during which they engaged in self-flagellation about it, Palestinians enjoyed a bit of schadenfreude. If they were made to suffer at Israel’s hands, watching the Israelis suffer offered a delicious bit of vengeance-fulfilled.
But now questions are arising about whether this narrative of the events is accurate. In a prison system in which such escapes are unheard of, how did this one succeed? One senior Israeli prison official termed this “a catastrophe never before seen by Israel’s prison services.” In past instances in which Palestinian terror suspects have gone to ground after mounting an attack, Israeli forces routinely murder the suspects once they’ve discovered their hiding place (though for media purposes they are always killed in a desperate Trumpeldor-like “firefight”). This is a long “tradition” going back to the Bus 300 terror attack. In the current case, most of the prisoners were captured without a scratch on them (there was one picture of a detainee with a swollen cheek).
Perhaps the oddest development involved the capture of the two outstanding escapees in Jenin yesterday. Some of the six had been residents of the Jenin refugee camp, and all of them are from Jenin area. Thus, everyone expected them to make a beeline for the camp from the prison. Yet that’s not what happened.
Inside the camp, all of the Palestinian militant groups united in an unprecedented act of solidarity, establishing a joint resistance force to meet the expected Israeli onslaught:
Residents of Jenin are used to waking up at night to the sound of shooting and explosions when an arrest takes place in their city or in the adjacent refugee camp. But on Sundayת they slept soundly through the night only to be wakened by the surprising news that two prisoners who escaped from Gilboa Prison were arrested in the city – with barely any resistance.
Many in the West Bank were afraid during the past two weeks that they would be forced to bear the consequences of the escape of the prisoners, with Israeli security forces holding extensive searches for them. The same was true in Jenin.
But it never came to pass. The two prisoners were taken not inside the camp, but in the town of Jenin, outside it:
…Palestinians…raised questions about the prisoners’ actions after the escape. A relative of Kahamji said that one of the questions bothering many in Jenin is why the prisoners did not flee to the refugee camp. Located just a few minutes’ drive from the place where they were hiding, the camp would have been a safer location for them.
Israeli forces never fired a bullet. There was no resistance. Why weren’t they inside the camp, where they would have been protected and defended? If they were true militants they would have welcomed making a brave last stand against the Israeli oppressor and becoming martyrs for the resistance.
My source has laid out a shocking counter-narrative. According to him, the Great Escape was nothing of the sort. The prisoners are not heroes at all. In fact, they are Israeli informants inside the prison. The “escape” was planned by Israeli authorities to transform them into resistance heroes and burnish their credentials so that other prisoners would trust them. It’s known that inside these security prisons, detainees plan terror attacks. That’s why Israel recruits snitches to disrupt such plots.
In a related matter, one of the detainees, Zakaria al-Zubeidi was known before his arrest as the leader of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in the Jenin refugee camp. He was a charismatic figure, with a complex set of motives and checkered backstory. At one time, he believed in co-existance with Israelis. He was one of the first Palestinians to participate in the Jenin Freedom Theater, founded by Israeli activists Arna Mer-Khamis. She welcomed him into the circle of not just the theater, but the heart of her own family (she was married to a Palestinian and lived in the camp). But then Israeli forces murdered both his mother and sibling and he turned away from non-violence.
In 2011, Mer-Khamis’ son Juliano was sitting in a car outside the theater with his child when a gunman fired shots into the vehicle, killing him. Suspicion immediately focused on Al-Zubeidi. As the chief of security forces there, he would have to have known of such a plot, if not planned it himself. Curiously, no one was ever arrested or charged and the crime remains unsolved. It seems neither Israeli nor Palestinian security forces were interested in doing so. One way to explain this is if al-Zubeidi was already an informant for the Shin Bet. Indeed, his Israeli one-time lover, Tali Fahima, testified to such a claim herself in an Israeli TV interview:
In an interview with Israel’s Channel 10 in 2008, Fahima accused Zubeidi of collaborating with Israel’s Shin Bet security service after he secured permission to travel from Jenin to the West Bank city of Ramallah for eye surgery.
Did Juliano discover that al-Zubeidi was a Shin Bet informant? Is that why he died?
I’ve always thought it was a shameful betrayal by Israeli law enforcement that an Israeli Jew was murdered by a Palestinian gunman, yet they barely lifted a finger to find and punish his murderer. Of course, why would they want to solve it? After all, Mer-Khamis was an ardent opponent of the Occupation regime. His theater was an international embarrassment, as it toured the world offering dramatic re-enactments of the oppression facing Palestinians under Israeli apartheid rule. From the point of view of the security forces, the Israeli theater director’s murder was an abject lesson in what happens when a Jew betrays his people and sides with the enemy.
On a critical note, if Zubeidi was a valued informant, as this version of the story goes, then why would the security services destroy that value by turning him into a Palestinian traitor? As is clear from the militant’s past, he appears to be someone capable of switching sides depending on what’s best for him. He once was a peace activist, then became militant commander. What if he switched sides after being an informant and became a double agent? That would give the Shin Bet ample motivation for destroying his reputation among his fellow Palestinians.
On a related note, it’s striking that while the escapees were charged with terror attacks which murdered Israeli Jews, two of them had never been charged with any crime, let alone tried or convicted. Administrative detention allows Israeli authorities maximum flexibility in dealing with such suspects. They can imprison them for as long as they like. They don’t have to go to the trouble of mounting a legal case against them and proving their guilt in court. They also don’t have to face any unpleasant surprises that might complicate prosecution, such as charges that the defendants were valued informants for the State against their fellow prisoners. The Shin Bet would rather not face the prospect of explaining how one of its informants might have committed crimes against Israeli Jews while working for it.
In the interest of full disclosure, there are many aspects of this counter-narrative that are troubling and even hard to believe. Among them: it’s convenient for Israel to offer an alternative version of events which lets prison authorities off the hook as they grapple with the terrible media coverage they received. This account also tends to sow doubt among Palestinians about the nature of the events. Instead of heroes, are these six prisoners informers who would betray their own comrades on behalf of Israel? Is the Israeli account intended to counter the damage done to its security capability by fomenting disunity and distrust amongst Palestinians?
There is no way for me to tell for certain whether the account offered to me is true. I can only weigh the theory both for its strengths and weaknesses. The future should bring some clarity to this strange incident.
‘My source has laid out a shocking counter-narrative. According to him, the Great Escape was nothing of the sort. The prisoners are not heroes at all. In fact, they are Israeli informants inside the prison. The “escape” was planned by Israeli authorities to transform them into resistance heroes and burnish their credentials so that other prisoners would trust them….’
Wheels within wheels…
Methinks you are being used. Had the Jews merely wanted to burnish the credentials of the ‘escapees’ they would have come up with some device that didn’t involve handing the Palestinians a propaganda victory: like, catch them all immediately.
Now — it having happened — the best thing to do is to call into question the authenticity of the escapees. And who better to feed the (dis) information to than you?
Think of it as a compliment. You’re important!
Everything you’ve considered I have as well…more than once. Any thing’s possible. The source may be using me to put forward a narrative that kills many birds for him with a single stone. I don’t discount that possibility. But with only one exception I can recall, this source has been extremely reliable and candid (though not without his own agenda). As I wrote, we will have to wait and see. Meanwhile, I will be attentive to reporting on this story in Israel that either strengthens or weakens the narrative the source offered. And will update here accordingly.
Make sure in future you distinguish between “Jews” and “Israelis” in your comments. They are not the same.
“Had the Jews merely wanted to burnish the credentials of the ‘escapees’”
What have ‘Jews’ to do with the story?
Wasn’t this an Israeli thing? Or was this a world Jewish conspiracy, Colin Wright?
Methinks anti-semitism has sneaked in here.
Richard, did you miss this?
Colin had his own website, one portion of which was dedicated to ‘Jews’.
He deleted that portion the next day after the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre.
Let’s just say that Colin thinks about Jews a lot more than most people.
Moving on, Richard said:
“…two of them had never been charged with any crime, let alone tried or convicted. Administrative detention allows Israeli authorities maximum flexibility in dealing with such suspects.”
And for twenty years, American authorities have done the very same thing.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/11/why-is-guantanamo-bay-prison-still-open-20-years-after-9#:~:text=Many%20detainees%20%E2%80%93%20mostly%20Muslim%20men,and%20yet%20remains%20in%20prison.
Administrative detention as practiced by the ever-expanding racist Zionist State is a crime against humanity IMO…the fact that the the other criminal enterprise the US practices it as well means what exactly in your opinion?…oh, and it was a favourite tactic of those other criminals, the racist whites of the old South Africa while trying to hold onto their colonial conquest in the face of resistance by the liberation forces
@Willem
How do you define ‘crimes against humanity’?
Are you relying on the Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the ICC?
Can you please apply the facts to the law so we can better understand if Israel is guilt of the crimes you charge.
Stay well,
Sonic
He wrote ‘in his opinion’. I am of course not sure what humanity sonic refers to? Certainly there is none in the Assassination State. And the west in general is sorely lacking, in all but greed…
@ Sonic: Most of us here who aren’t pro-Israel shills understand quite well Israel’s crimes against humanity. It’s one of the key themes in this blog which offers all the evidence any reasonable person would ever need. If you need to have it explained to you it means you’re a pro-Israel troll.
We cannot have many different opinions on what a law is.
We all have to agree on what elements or conditions need to be met in order to satisfy that law.
If, as you say, you understand Israel’s crimes against humanity, you should have no problem then explaining how Israel’s conduct violates, Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the ICJ.
Okay, I’m a pro Israel troll and I need to have it explained.
Maybe some anti-Zionists trolls as well could benefit from an explanation.
@ Sonic: I’m not your on-call expert. This isn’t Quora. I don’t answer to your challenges.
The outlines of war crimes and crimes against humanity are quite clear and the world generally agrees (except for a few outliers like Israel & the US) that Israel has committed such crimes. There are literally thousands of expert treatises and articles documenting such claims. Numerous Israeli NGOs have documented them. This blog has documented them. The ICC spent years determining whether to open such an investigation and has done so because it has satisfied itself the evidentiary threshold has been met.
Anti-Zionists and even some Zionists don’t need to have this explained to them. They accept what is obvious to most reasonable people. But trolls who are looking to pick a quarrel most definitely do.
@Richard
Willem said that an abuse use of administrative detention is a a crime against humanity. Administrative detention is not a crime against humanity. What crime against humanity Israel is being accused of, is ‘apartheid’.
I asked Willem what definition of Crimes Against Humanity he was using because there are several definitions, including
Art. 7(1)(j) in conjunction with Art. 7(2)(h) of the Rome Statute, as well as Art. 2 of the UN Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (Apartheid Convention.
Question: Does Israel practice ‘apartheid’?
I’m not sure.
What I do know is that Jews and Palestinians are two separate national, ethnic groups and each possesses a self-determination claim; Palestinians want a “Palestinian” State and Jews want a “Jewish” State.
Ponder this.
Is it racial discrimination when Zionist Jews and Zionist Christians wants a piece of land to be ‘Jewish’?
Is it racial discrimination when Palestinians and Muslims want that same piece of land to be ‘Palestinian’?
You don’t get to define what is a crime against humanity. Administrative detention is a violation of the Geneva Convention.
Land is land. It has no intrinsic religious or national identity. Jews can no more say a land is Jewish than a Christian American can say this land is Christian. The land you calL Israel has been called many names by thousands of tribes and clans which lived there for tens of thousands of years before Israelites came along. It will probably be called other names in the next billion or so years, if the earth even survives. The notion that you or anyone owns land by dint of religion is counter historical and ridiculous.
Do NOT make the mistake of using the term “Jewish” when referring to Israel.
Yes, Israel is an apartheid state.
@ Sonic: First, what America did in Guantanamo is illegal and a violation of the constitution. The entire system has been widely denounced. And only 8 prisoners were ever tried from Guantanano and only 3 were ever convicted of crimes. Out of 700 prisoners total. Guantanamo is a failed enterprise on every level. See The Mauritanian on cable. Can you ever recall an Israeli film which denounced administrative detention as this film does? NO, you can’t.
Further Guantanamo was used in very limited circumstances, while Israeli administrative detention has been used in tens of thousands of cases over the past 70 years. Nice try, but no cigar buddy.
On any given day, only about 5% of Palestinians prisoners are held under administrative detention.
And on any given day, about 350 Palestinians are being held in administrative detention. That’s out of a population of what, five million Palestinians between the river and the sea?
Administrative detainees are not being held in a ‘star chamber’.
Detention orders are drafted by prosecutors and are approved or denied by judges. If approved the detainee can appeal right up to the Israeli Supreme Court.
Many Western democracies use administrative detention as means to combat terrorism.
The number of Palestinians who have been imprisoned by Israel is astronomical. 1-million since 1967. If we eliminate Palestinian women from this statistic as relatively few are arrested, it means that as many as 20-25% of Palestinian men at any given time are in prison or have served time there. Israel has criminalized the act of being Palestinian. So don’t dare try to minimize the illegal and corrosive effect of this system.
Nor try to argue that the fact that a prosecutor or sham Israeli judge acting as a master of a kangaroo security court kashers the entire sordid process. There is nothing marginally acceptable about administrative detention In a democratic state. It belongs in a police stare, which is what Israel has become.
Democratic nations which use administrative detention, use it sparingly and in exceptional cases. Israel uses it routinely and as a foundation of its national security state.
@Richard – your statistics is just wrong, not to say a vile propaganda!
The official numbers are so much lower – I felt embarrassed reading your statement.
Where did you get those numbers from?
I bet from a reputable source, such as AlJazeera or Hamas or Jihad Tv?
@ Alex: There are no ‘statistics’ in my post. So I have no idea what you’re talking about. And if you post another comment again containing Islamophobic snark, you’ll never post again.
Richard – by statistics I was referring to yiur comment that 1mil Palestinians were in Israeli prisons. But when you say the information you post is not a proven statistical data -it amounts to just throwing numbers at the ceiling fan..
Not sure what are you referring to as Islamophobic too..
Here is one source:
And another:
I expect an apology from you. If you do not, I will ban you. And do not doubt my research or statistics next time or you will regret it.
Richard.
Your comment went, “The number of Palestinians who have been imprisoned by Israel is astronomical. 1-million since 1967″, yet the quote PPS quote you cited says, “Israeli authorities have detained approximately one million Palestinians since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948″.
Is it 1-million since 1948 or 1967?
Even if 600,000 have been held in jail for a week or more since 1967, you have to consider what were the numbers of jailed Palestinians during the violent First and Second Intifadas. A large number of that 600,000 figure were probably arrested or detained during the Intifadas.
@ SOnic:
It’s both. You did not read the full sentence you quoted. The 1-million figure includes all Israeli Palestinians imprisoned since 1948 and includes all Palestinians from the Occupied Territories imprisoned since 1967. While a large number of Israeli Palestinians have been imprisoned by Israel since 1948, I would guess that the number of Palestinians jailed from the Territories has been far larger. So I view the ’67 reference I used as reasonable.
As for when these Palestinians were imprisoned, I could care less. And it’s irrelevant as far as I’m concerned. Administrative detention, mass incarceration and collective punishment are offensive and illegal, full stop. Whether they happened during the First, Second or Eighth Intifada.
@ Alex: Don’t be cute with me. If you don’t know why this is offensive and Islamophobic then you’re a dolt:
Try this again & you’re toast.
It has been 7 hrs since my last comment outlining the evidence for my claim 1-million Palestinians have been imprisoned by Israel. You still have no apologized for your error. Therefore, I am banning you. If you do choose to apologize you may do so via my Contact link and I will unban you.
@ Sonic: I “think about Jews more than most people.” Does that make me an anti-Semite?
[comment deleted: this is a NO Anti-Semitism Zone!]
@ Shai: Yes, I missed that. I’ve added a warning to distinguish between the two in future.
Its about time “social engineering” becomes a university offering worldwide, instead of being an asset in the hands of the privileged few.
‘By deception thou shalt make war…’ Richard’s narrative here does not explain why family members or the prisoners were arrested. I for one personally learned the very hard way to never trust any Israeli ‘source’. Ever. Under any circumstance. But that’s just me. RS’s article does not state that the source is Israeli but this narrative has Oleh chadash enlisted in Tzahal written all over it. (Many superb fairy tales originate from the pontic steppe, and I think — I think — this is in that tradition.) Like my recent article, CIA’s Bitcoin Heist which only Strategika51 would carry, I cannot state the authoritative source for my article, because his life would be endangered. I will write that my source is a former central banker… as in very former. Since Richard cannot name his source, he is in the same boat. Except I seriously doubt that Richard’s source would be endangered by releasing what seems like shin bet agitprop. Regardless of that, if a staged event to cred Palestinian spies, it was a stupid stunt with unintended consequences. To the extent that the NYT had to “update” its story about Israel’s “super spy killing machine” that so “cleverly” assassinated an Iranian scientist. Such clever assassins. At least (if true) this stunt was a notch above Operation Bramble Bush… except this time the wrong people got hurt.
Richard’s narrative and mysterious source does not explain why family members or the prisoners were arrested, and some — according to multiple reports — beaten. The narrative as related is one that even a Bond novel could not make credible. It assumes that this whole affair, which tarnished the prison regime’s image and resulted in riots, was intended to aid shin bet information gathering from inside the prison, after the prisoners were re-captured. In that case, the prisoners would have been apprehended as a group and far more quickly. The split numbers of their re-capture would otherwise be so elaborate as to defy logic and surely reality. More like typical Duplicitous State deception.
SHTUYOT!!!!!!!!!