Bethlehem -

“If you had a nail or a spoon, it would be your means to escape from prison, and this is not important, but rather the desire to go out to freedom.” With these words, the former Palestinian prisoner Amjad al-Deek summed up the experience of his escape in 2003 from the Israeli “Ofer” prison near Ramallah , the center of the West Bank.

Al-Deek, from the town of Kafr Nima, west of Ramallah, told Al-Jazeera Net that anyone who has been deprived of his freedom thinks of getting out of the place where he is being held in any way, "It is not important how, where, when and what will happen, the only important thing is the goal... to gain his freedom."

Amjad Al-Deek tells the story of his escape from an Israeli prison in 2003 (Al-Jazeera Net)

walls and wires

Al-Deek, who spent 16 years in the prisons of the occupation and was released in 2018, recounts how the idea of ​​escaping began with his two companions, Riad Khalifa and Khaled Shanita, as his shed (what looked like a bed in prison) was next to Shnaita’s sprinkler, in a tent surrounded by barbed wire and heavily guarded prison. Ofer, the Israeli.

But when the preparations for the escape began, Al-Deek and his companions were surprised by the escape of two prisoners from the same prison, in January 2003, taking advantage of the thick fog that covered the area, as they managed to cross the surrounding barbed wire.

This prompted the occupation to change the guarding procedures around the prison, which housed more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners at the time, and to build cement walls 8-10 meters high, and surround them with wires, watchtowers and sniffer dogs.

The mouth of the tunnel through which the six prisoners escaped from the Israeli Gilboa prison (Aribah sites)

spoon..

The three prisoners waited for the new guard procedures to be completed, and they took advantage of the spoon to start digging between the beds of the rooster and Shnaita in the asphalt floor.

This took a whole week, and they hid what came out of the dirt under the mattress or in the covers.

And the rooster continues - for Al Jazeera Net - after reaching the dirt floor, they faced some rocks, so they dig around and change direction in search of a dirt path that is easy to dig.

The excavation continued until they reached the outside of the concrete wall after 17 days.

The tunnel was more than a meter deep, and they continued digging for 13 meters until its mouth was outside the prison.

At that time, the three decided to go out to the surrounding mountains, and that was at four in the morning on May 12, 2003.

Israeli combing operations to search for 6 Palestinian prisoners who escaped from Gilboa Military Prison (Getty)

7 months of hiding

The rooster describes the moment of the escape as akin to a miracle. A glimpse of one of the jailers is enough to detect them, but no one has seen them.

They walked about 10-13 kilometers away from the prison, and were able to hide in the mountains for about 7 months, watching the flights and the combing operations that the occupation was conducting in search of them.

They succeeded in disappearing until the occupation surrounded them in one of the caves near his town, Kafr Nima, and killed Riad Khalifa, a few meters away from Al-Deek and Shanita, and arrested them again.

Shanita was released after a while, but the occupation chased him and killed him years later.

Amjad al-Deek remained in prison until he finished his 15-year sentence, then another additional year.

On the day he was scheduled to be released, the occupation army decided - on the pretext that there was a case against him - to postpone his release for another year, and the rooster knew that they were taking revenge on his escape.

We asked him to compare what happened to him and the escape of the six prisoners from Gilboa prison at dawn on Monday. He said, "Many refuse to stay in this place because they were created free, and they are ready to pay any price to gain their freedom."


nail scissor

The escape of the six prisoners also brought back memories of the escape of the former prisoner Yasser Muhammad Saleh (62 years old), from Jabalia camp in the Gaza Strip, from which he escaped on January 2, 1995 from the Negev desert prison in southern Palestine, and arrived at the Egyptian border, where he was re-arrested once again.

Saleh watched the prison closely and found that the kitchen was the closest exit point.

Despite the presence of two watchtowers, he chose the time well in a very cold weather as the soldiers in the tower moved away from the windows a little, and he carried with him nail scissors that helped him cut the wires surrounding the prison and escape.

In his speech to Al-Jazeera Net, Saleh describes passing wires as a "moment of freedom" from a jailer who restricts and isolates him in cells, stresses him in the investigation, targets his body, increases his illness, empties his mind, and tries to insult him, so "he puts freedom in mind at all costs."

Saleh's mistake was that he did not estimate time well to reach the Egyptian border, and his escape was discovered, and his pursuit began when he approached a military tower surrounded by trained police dogs that began to bark and drew the attention of the soldiers, who arrested him and sent him back to prison and for investigation again, after which he spent 15 years in detention.

miracle and victory

Saleh describes - to Al Jazeera Net - the escape of the six prisoners from "Gilboa" prison as a miracle, "as if it were divine intervention," he says. Gilboa prison was designed by the occupation after all the past experiences of escape, and described it as a "fortified safe" with high-tech surveillance tools.

But what happened, according to Saleh, was “a victory over the Zionist security theory,” as well as “a victory for prisoners who hid dirt in a cell whose floors and windows are checked and everything in it is checked 3 times a day, and 3 more times to ensure their number.”

He adds, "Not leaking any information from 6 people is a victory, and for the observer to get out of a watchtower in a moment of nap, and to be able to escape and hide from sight, are things that show truth and hope not only in liberating prisoners, but in liberating all of Palestine."

Remember other incidents

Amjad al-Deek and Yasser Saleh were not the only Palestinian prisoners who escaped from Israeli prisons or tried to do so. With the publication of the news of the escape of the six prisoners from Gilboa prison, the Palestinians began circulating repeated stories of escape, and even failed attempts that did not stop throughout their conflict.

Activists on social media re-published video clips from the "Witness to the Age" program on Al-Jazeera, with the freed prisoner Abdel Hakim Hanini, who tried to escape from the occupation prisons, and the details of his exciting story.

It also published clips from the Palestinian series "The Spirit", which was shown in 2014, and the media used them for representative scenes simulating the escape of the six prisoners.