WEST BANK (AP) – A Zionist court on Sunday sentenced six Palestinian inmates to five years in prison for tunneling out of their cell last year and escaping from a high-security facility in the biggest prison break of its kind in decades.
The jailbreak sparked a massive manhunt in the country’s north and the occupied West Bank in search for the men, who were members of Palestinian resistance movements. They were recaptured days later.
The bold escape dominated newscasts, sparked heavy criticism of the occupying regime’s prison service and prompted the government to launch an inquiry. According to various reports, the men dug a tunnel through the floor of their shared cell undetected over several months and managed to slip past a sleeping prison guard after emerging through a hole outside the facility.
The judge ruled that the sentence took into account the fact that the prison break paralyzed the regime for days, the costs it took to recapture the inmates and the harm to public security caused by having prisoners under life sentence and convicted of serious crimes escape.
The five-year sentence will be added to the prison terms the prisoners were already serving. Five other inmates charged with assisting the men were sentenced to an additional four years.
Five of the escapees are from the Islamic Jihad resistance movement, with four of them serving life sentences. The sixth, Zakaria Zubeidi, is a member of the Fatah group of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Zubeidi was a resistance leader during the second Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s and well known in the occupied territories.
Palestinians consider prisoners held by the occupied territories to be heroes of their national cause and many on social media celebrated the escape and held demonstrations in support of the prisoners.
Meanwhile, Palestinian prisoners keep boycotting the Zionist regime’s military courts on the 142nd consecutive day of their protest action against the so-called policy of administrative detention.
Nearly 500 inmates have been refusing to show up for their military court hearings since the beginning of the year, Palestine’s official Wafa news agency reported on Sunday.
The boycott targets hearings for the renewal of administrative detention orders as well as appeal hearings and later sessions at the regime’s so-called ‘supreme court.’ The move is the protraction of longstanding efforts to end the unjust detention practiced against the Palestinians.
The detainees say the courts are a “barbaric, racist tool that has consumed hundreds of years from the lives of our people under the banner of administrative detention, through nominal and fictitious courts – the results of which are predetermined by the military commander of the region.”