Two prisoners hid at a military base and jailers mocked the crossbar during digging.. Exciting details revealed by the investigation of the prisoners of the “Freedom Tunnel”

Occupied Jerusalem

- Israeli media revealed - yesterday evening, Wednesday - exciting details from the diaries of the six prisoners who managed to escape from the Israeli Gilboa prison on the sixth of last September before they were arrested two weeks after the escape.

The Israeli General Security Service "Shin Bet" - which is in charge of interrogating the prisoners of the "Freedom Tunnel" - claimed that two of the fugitive prisoners submitted, through an unnamed person, a request to Palestinian Prime Minister Muhammad Shtayyeh to provide a "protective arrest" for the two prisoners, Ayham Kammji and Nidal Nafeat, However, he refused, saying, "We do not want complications and death," a narrative that the Palestinian side has not commented on so far.

According to the "Shin Bet" investigation file - excerpts of which were published by the official Israeli television "Kan" yesterday evening Wednesday, the two captives, Kamji and Nafeat, submitted a request to the Palestinian Prime Minister, according to Israeli allegations, as they succeeded in bypassing the apartheid wall and reaching the city of Jenin, although the occupation forces monitored Their movements in the areas adjacent to the border with the occupied West Bank.

The publication of the leaks from the Shin Bet investigations comes 5 weeks after the escape from Gilboa prison, which is considered one of the most fortified and guarded Israeli prisons. - Who wrested their freedom through a tunnel they dug for nearly a year.

Investigations revealed that the six prisoners succeeded on more than one occasion to hide from the Israeli security forces during searches and chases, despite the occupation forces besieging the areas where they disappeared, where they failed to arrest them.

Prisoner Yaqoub Qadri told interesting details of how he and Mahmoud Al-Ardah managed to hide near an Israeli military base (Reuters)

Qadri: We hid near a military base

According to the leaks from the investigation file, the prisoner Yaqoub Qadri, after his escape, succeeded in hiding for 24 hours near an Israeli army camp in the north of the country, where he said - in the investigation - "I climbed with Mahmoud Al-Ardah - the scheme of the tunnel-digging operation and escape from prison - a mountain for more than two hours."

Qadri added in the investigation, "Suddenly we saw a wall of an Israeli army camp, and we decided to stay in the place until dark, as we assumed that the Israeli forces would not expect us to hide near the camp. If we wanted, we could have harmed a soldier," according to the allegations of the Shin Bet regarding the statements attributed to Ardah.

Qadri continued - in the investigation file - "We dug a hole and hid in it, and we covered ourselves with weeds and tree branches, in the location where we were located, which is only 5 meters from the external walls of the camp.

"During the hiding, we saw the soldiers entering and leaving the camp, but none of the soldiers could find us and find out about us," he added.

Mosque minarets lights

Qadri went on to say - according to what was reported in the Israeli investigations - "When it got dark, we got out of the hole in which we hid near the camp and proceeded to walk towards one of the Arab villages near the place, where we did not know which town was our destination, but we knew that the talk was about a town Arab lights from the minarets of mosques.

And Qadri continued - in the leak of the investigation file, which was published by the official Israeli television - "At first glance, when we reached the outskirts of the town and the first residential neighborhoods, we thought that the talk was about a Jewish town, because of the nature of urbanization and houses, and we said, "It is not reasonable for these houses to be inhabited by Arabs, because The nature of the construction suggests that the residents of these houses are Jews.”

And he added, according to the investigations, "It seems that we were not aware of the development of construction and changes in Arab towns during the past 20 years because of our presence in prison all these years."

The prisoners revealed how they managed to escape more than once from the occupation forces that were besieging them (Getty Images)

Nafaat: We managed to escape more than once

In comparison with Qadri and al-Ardah, who continued to walk towards the north of the country, two other prisoners headed south to the Jenin area, one of them was Nafa'at's activist, who was accompanied by Ayham Kammji.

According to the Israeli investigation leaks, the occupation forces monitored their movements, but they managed to escape. "During our walk at night towards Jenin, an Israeli police patrol spotted our movement. It stopped at the side of the road and the patrol members lit their flashlights towards us."

Then - continues Nafeat - "I and Kammaji fled separately and in two different directions, where I reached an opening in the wall near Jenin that workers and Palestinians use to move without permits. I sat with dozens of workers at the opening and stayed for a while, then entered Jenin through it."

During the escape, the chase and the searches, the prisoners were able to listen to the reports and news broadcast by the Israeli media.

He continued, "Some of the information that was received was misleading and far from reality, and some of it has nothing to do with reality, and the media exaggerated and exaggerated some details."

Nafeat added - in the investigation - "When we arrived at Jenin camp, we moved between several hiding locations, where we were able to watch television, and many correspondents in the Israeli media spoke and reported on plans that we intend to implement and implement, plans that do not exist at all and did not exist. We are looking forward to implementing them, for example, they said that we plan to escape and cross into Jordan, and in practice we went to the West Bank to obtain a protective detention by the Palestinian Authority.”

The jailers laughed at digging the tunnel

The testimonies of the six prisoners and the investigation file revealed - according to the official Israeli TV - "the extent of the failures and failures of the Israeli Prison Service, which made the escape from Gilboa prison a success, according to the description of those testimonies."

"Kan" quoted Kammji as saying - in the investigation file regarding the period leading up to the escape operation - "during July - that is, two months before the execution of the escape operation - there were extensive searches in the cell in which we are."

Kammaji continued, "One of the guards noticed a break in the iron piece on the floor of the cell toilet, and this was practically the entrance hole to the tunnel, as Mahmoud was convinced that our order had been revealed, when the guard called the officer, who replied that the fracture is normal and that it is present in many prison cells. ".

The investigation records included what the prisoners said about the jailers’ attempt to provoke the prisoner Mahmoud al-Ardah, the leader of the escape operation, who had succeeded in digging a tunnel during his captivity in 2014 in Shata Prison, adjacent to Gilboa Prison.

The investigation report describes what was said by one of the prisoners, where he referred to the attempt by some of the wardens to belittle the experience of prisoner Mahmoud Ardah in 2014, unaware that in those particular days he was “digging a tunnel under their noses.”

According to what was stated in the investigation file, "the jailers were carrying out cell searches at night, and they did not complain about anything. On the contrary, they mocked Mahmoud Arda's escape plan and told him, "Where did you go in digging the tunnel?"