Gaza,
May 12 (Islamonline.net)- Four Palestinian prisoners managed to escape
from military prison “Ofer”, southern Ramallah city, Monday, May
11, after digging land tunnel, leading to Betonia city in the West
Bank.
Sheikh
Saadi, an official in the Islamic Jihad movement, said that the four
prisoners are in a safe place.
Three
of the prisoners on the run are from the Islamic Jihad group while the
fourth is from Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah group, an
Islamic Jihad source said.
The
Israeli radio said that the prisoners on the run are Amjad Aldeek,
Mohamed Elwana, Ayyad Khalifa, and Khaled Jamayta.
It
pointed out that the Israeli forces placed military check points on
Ramallah borders and imposed a curfew on Betonia searching for them.
This
is the second time that prisoners successfully escape from Ofer
detention camp.
“The
occupation forces built concrete walls between the ten divisions of
the prison 5 meters high, which bar detainees from seeing anything
outside the division, and this badly affects their moral,” a number
of detainees who have been released earlier form Ofer told
Islamonline.net.
They
added, “that came after the first escape from Ofer on Jan 21,
2003”.
“The
Israelis put additional barbered wires, so each division will be
surrounded by three walls of wires and a concrete one, rather than
watching towers and the periodic statistic of detainees is done three
times a day,” they stressed.
“Guantanamo”
 |
|
One
of Israeli prisons
|
Prisoners
call Ofer “ Palestine Guantanamo”, a reference to the U.S. camp
where thousands of Afghanis and Arabs are detained in Cuba, claiming
that they are al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
The
two camps are very similar, since they lack the minimum level of human
life conditions, as prisoners are exposed to barbaric torture, without
being accused of any crimes of even presented to court, according to
observers.
Ofer
contains 960 prisoners, more than half of them are administrative
detainees “without trial”.
It
has been built in the British mandate era, supervised later by the
Jordanian military before it became under Israel's control after the
occupation of the West Bank in 1967.
It
was named after the Israeli officer who occupied west bank.
Administrative
detainees spend periods that range from 3- 6 months, and their
detention is renewed.
The
four prisoners were captured last year during an Israeli incursion of
the West Bank.
