Two Israelis were briefly detained by police on Sunday after they apparently strayed into a minefield in the northern Golan Heights and refused to be rescued by IDF forces.
A hiker near the Daughters of Jacob Bridge alerted authorities after noticing two people wandering in an adjacent field beyond the landmine warning signs.
According to the Ynet news website, IDF forces scrambled to deploy a helicopter to warn the two, and ordered them to wait for rescue teams to extract them safely.
Instead of waiting for the Air Force’s elite Unit 669 and Combat Engineering Corps to arrive, the pair decided to exit the minefield by themselves.
The two, identified as residents of the nearby Druze village of Beit Jann, were detained for questioning as they left the area.
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They told police afterwards they entered the field to look for edible plants.
The Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria during the 1967 Six Day War, is littered with landmines, although many have been removed and minefields have largely been demarcated by a network of fences and warning signs.
Still, accidents involving landmines occur there every few years.
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