‘Israeli’ Prisons Examined By Engineers amid Fears of More Escapes

By Staff, Agencies

Amid fears of more humiliation of the ‘Israeli’ regime’s prestige in the wake of last week’s escape from the Zionist entity’s most fortified prison of Gilboa, the occupation regime sought engineering teams to conduct scans of every prison in the occupied territories.

The ‘Israel’ Prisons Service [IPS] has been heavily criticized, following the escape of six Palestinian security prisoners in the early hours of Monday morning, for the many lapses that allowed it to happen.

A key source of embarrassment to the Zionist security establishment was that the six Palestinian detainees had fled the jail by tunneling through their cell’s drainage system and into an empty space in the foundations of the prison, through which they rather easily crawled beyond its walls.

Even more rubbing salt in the ‘Israeli’ entity’s wound was the revelation that the IPS had been aware of the infrastructural flaw, as it had been similarly targeted in a failed escape plan in 2014.

The blueprints for Gilboa Prison, along with several other IPS facilities, were also readily available online ahead of the escape. On Saturday night, six days after the prison break, the plans for one prison — Shikma Prison, near Ashkelon — remained on the internet, until a report on the matted by Channel 13 news prompted the ‘Israel’ Prisons Service to have it removed.

Following Monday’s jailbreak, the IPS began to move Palestinian detainees of the Islamic Jihad resistance movement between facilities and into individual cells, in an attempt to prevent another escape attempt. Five of the escapees were members of Islamic Jihad.

Unrest escalated in the prisons over the apparent new restrictions, with a number of cells being set on fire by security inmates.

Four of the six escapees from Gilboa prison, including resistance commander Zakaria Zubeidi, were caught by security forces on Friday night and early Saturday morning.

The escape exposed a series of failures at the prison, and the Zionist entity’s so-called Public Security Minister Omer Barlev said on Thursday that he had decided to form a government commission to probe the incident.

Among the apparent lapses were failure to learn lessons from previous escape attempts and several operational blunders, including unmanned watchtowers and sleeping guards.