The humble spoon has taken its place alongside traditional flags and banners as a Palestinian resistance symbol, after prisoners were said to have carried out one of Israel’s most spectacular jail breaks with the utensil.<\/P>
<\/P>
When the six Palestinian militants escaped through a tunnel on September 6 from the high security Gilboa prison, social networks shared images of a tunnel at the foot of a sink, and a hole dug outside.<\/P>
<\/P>
A hashtag, “the miraculous spoon”, suggested how the Hollywood-style feat might have occurred.<\/P>
<\/P>
But whether or not the utensil had really been involved or its role was cooked up was at first unclear.<\/P>
<\/P>
Then on Wednesday a lawyer for one of the fugitives who has since been recaptured told AFP that his client, Mahmud Abdullah Ardah, said he had used spoons, plates and even the handle of a kettle to dig the tunnel from his cell.<\/P>
<\/P>
He began scraping his way out from the northern Israeli institution in December, the lawyer, Roslan Mahajana, said.<\/P>
<\/P>
Ardah was one of four fugitives later arrested after the army poured troops into the occupied West Bank as part of a massive manhunt.<\/P>
<\/P>
All six were accused of plotting or carrying out attacks against Israelis.<\/P>
<\/P>
Two men remain on the loose following the extremely rare escape. Israel has begun an inquiry into lapses that led to the embarrassing incident, which Palestinians see as a “victory”.<\/P>
<\/P>
“With determination, vigilance… and cunning, and with a spoon, it was possible to dig a tunnel through which the Palestinians escaped and the enemy was imprisoned,” writer Sari Orabi said on the Arabi 21 website.<\/P>
<\/P>
Palestinian cartoonist Mohammed Sabaaneh says the escape has served up “black humour” and exposed Israel’s security system to ridicule.<\/P>
<\/P>
He has made several drawings featuring the utensil, including one titled “The Tunnel of Freedom”.<\/P>
<\/P>
The issue has also stirred admiration outside the Palestinian territories, where spoons have been carried in demonstrations supporting prisoners detained by Israel.<\/P>
<\/P>
In Kuwait, the artist Maitham Abdal sculpted a giant hand firmly clasping a spoon — the “spoon of freedom”, as he calls it.<\/P>
<\/P>
Similarly inspired, Amman-based graphic designer Raed al-Qatnani symbolically depicted six silhouettes taking a bridge to freedom, represented by a spoon.<\/P>
<\/P>
For him, it also evokes the numerous hunger strikes undertaken by Palestinian prisoners to protest their incarceration.<\/P>
<\/P>
In Tulkarem, a city in the West Bank occupied since 1967 by Israel, the escape brought back memories for Ghassan Mahdawi. He and another prisoner escaped from an Israeli prison in 1996 through a tunnel dug using not kitchen implements but nails.<\/P>
<\/P>
He had been arrested for belonging to an armed group during the first Palestinian intifada, which lasted until the early 1990s.<\/P>
<\/P>
“There’s nothing prisoners can’t do… and there is always a flaw” in the system, said Mahdawi, who was rearrested and then released after a total of 19 years in custody.<\/P>
<\/P>
In his view, the most recent escapees may have used tools other than spoons, obtained inside the prison, to carry out what every prisoner dreams of but few accomplish.<\/P>
<\/P>
“To escape from an Israeli prison is something each inmate thinks about,” Mahdawi said.<\/P>
<\/P>
To have done it with a spoon, he added, is something that “will go down in history”.<\/P>
<\/P>
Source: National News Agency<\/P>
<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The humble spoon has taken its place alongside traditional flags and banners as a Palestinian resistance symbol, after prisoners were said to have carried out one of Israel’s most spectacular jail breaks with the utensil.When the six Palestinian milita…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1781,2],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n