
TODAY, IN A HUNDRED YEARS
LAST SEPTEMBER, six Palestinian militants escaped from Gilboa Prison, a maximum-security facility off Route 71 in northern Israel. Five were from Islamic Jihad; the sixth was from Fatah. All had passed through a tunnel scraped for months with plates and spoons so the men could drop through a bathroom floor to crawl more than seventy feet through the dark. Just beyond Gilboa’s walls—and in shocking view of a prison watchtower—the fugitives sprang from a hole in the dirt before melting into the night.
It was a humiliation. Shin Bet agents fanned out into the countryside and raked through the Occupied