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JERUSALEM — Israel on Sunday captured the last of the six Palestinian inmates who escaped a maximum-security prison nearly two weeks ago, ending an episode that Israelis saw as a humiliation of their security establishment and Palestinians celebrated as a rare black eye for the Israeli occupation.

The Israeli Army said in a statement that it had captured Munadil Nafayat and Eham Kamamji in Jenin, their hometown in the occupied West Bank, in an early-morning operation conducted jointly with a police special forces unit and the Israeli domestic intelligence agency, the Shin Bet.

Of the six prisoners who broke out of Gilboa prison in northern Israel on Sept. 6, Mr. Nafayat and Mr. Kamamji were the only ones who had managed to reach the West Bank. The other four were caught in northern Israel more than a week ago.

The six escaped their shared cell after removing part of the floor of their shower cubicle and crawling for nearly 32 yards underneath the prison, partly through a pre-existing cavity that extended from beneath the cell toward the prison perimeter.

Two people captured were identified as Zakaria Zubeidi and Mahmoud al-Arida. Both were reportedly found at a truck garage in northern Israel. Israeli authorities were quoted by news reports as saying that Zubeidi tried to resist arrest.

Early on Saturday, police said they caught the two men in the Arab town of Umm al-Ghanam. Zubeidi was a leader during the second Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s.



One of the captured men had been in prison since 1996 and was seen as the ringleader of the escape. . Five of the six men who escaped on Monday belong to the Islamic Jihad group, while one is a senior member of Fatah’s armed wing.

The six inmates have either been convicted or are suspected of planning or carrying out deadly attacks against Israelis.

Israel has promised to capture all of the men, and officials say they will investigate any lapses that allowed their escape.


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The fugitives are believed to have dug a hole in the floor of their cell over several months. It led to a cavity underneath the prison created when piles were sunk into the ground during its construction.

They are thought to have crawled through the space to reach the prison's outer wall, then dug a tunnel that emerged in the middle of a dirt road, just below a watchtower.

CCTV cameras captured them leaving the tunnel at about 01:30 on Monday. But the alarm was only raised at 04:00, after locals reported seeing "suspicious figures" in fields near the prison.

Israeli media have blamed the jailbreak on a number of security failures.

They included the publication of a blueprint of the prison on the website of the architects involved in its construction; the placing of six prisoners from Jenin in the same cell, including three considered of "high risk of escape"; and the decision to not switch on a jamming device that would have stopped them using smuggled mobile phones to communicate with people outside.

There were also unconfirmed reports that the guard stationed in the watchtower next to the tunnel exit was asleep during the escape.

Five of the fugitives - Mahmoud Ardah, Mohammed Ardah, Iham Kamamji, Yaqoub Qadri and Munadil Infaat - are members of the militant group Islamic Jihad. Four of them are serving life sentences after being convicted of planning or carrying out attacks that killed Israelis.

The sixth fugitive, Zakaria Zubeidi, is a former commander of Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade in Jenin. He was arrested by Israeli forces in 2019 on suspicion of involvement in a number of shooting attacks and was standing trial.