ISRAEL launched a manhunt today to find six Palestinian prisoners after they escaped from a high-security jail through a secret tunnel. 

The prisoners escaped from Gilboa jail in northern Israel in the early hours of the morning. Local media reports said the six managed to escape the high-security facility through a tunnel under a toilet in the cell from which they crawled out of the building. 

The daring jailbreak, reminiscent of the 1994 film Shawshank Redemption, prompted celebrations on the streets of West Bank towns and cities today. 

All six men are reported to be from the northern West Bank city of Jenin and shared the same cell. They include Zakaria Zubeidi, 46, a former Fatah party leader in Jenin, who had been held in Gilboa since 2019 without charge or trial. 

He escaped along with five members of Islamic Jihad, some of whome had been serving life sentences for involvement in attacks on Israelis during the Palestinian Intifada in the early 2000s. One had been held since 1996, according to a Palestinian prisoner support group. 

Mr Zubeidi was also the co-founder of the Freedom Theatre in Jenin refugee camp, and featured in Dutch-Israeli documentary Arna’s Children about the children’s theatre group. 

The Freedom Theatre said that it was celebrating but added: “Zakaria’s life is in danger and we are terrified of what might happen next.”

The preliminary investigation found that the six prisoners spent months digging the tunnel under the bathroom floor in their cell.

Police, soldiers and agents from Israel’s secret service Shin Bet were deployed today to search for them, with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet calling the escape a “serious incident.” 

Charlotte Kates, international co-ordiator of the Palestinian prisoner solidarity group Samidoun, said the escape was a powerful symbol of Palestinians’ enduring hope for freedom. 

“Samidoun campaigns for the release of all Palestinian prisoners. There is an apartheid system of justice that exists for Palestinians,” she told the Morning Star. “The system exists solely in order to punish, deter and suppress Palestinians’ resistance to Israeli occupation and colonialism.”

Israel holds about 4,750 Palestinians including 42 women, 200 children, and 550 administrative detainees, whose incarceration can last indefinitely without charge or trial. 

“Palestinian prisoners are subjected to political imprisonment on all levels, you have those who are detained and imprisoned and sentenced in military courts for participating in political activities on their campuses,” she said.

Ms Kates said she hoped the escape, while treated as a “crime story” internationally, will also draw attention to Israel’s mass incarceration of Palestinians. 

“This should prompt people to ask: ‘Why is it that Palestinians are being jailed by Israel at all? Why is it that not only are 4,750 Palestinian prisoners but also two million civilians trapped in an open-air prison in Gaza, and the entire Palestinian land and population existing under imprisonment of occupation — why is this being allowed to continue?”