Ex-public security minister: Prisons service, police have ‘difficulty telling truth’
Testifying before commission looking into security prisoners’ escape last year, MK Amir Ohana claims many top prisons service officers fear showing initiative, police force is same
Former public security minister MK Amir Ohana said that the Israel Prisons Service has an organizational problem with telling the truth as he testified Thursday before a committee investigating the escape of six security prisoners last year from the Gilboa Prison.
Ohana, now an opposition lawmaker, also slammed senior IPS officers as being too fearful of criticism to show initiative and said the same issues afflict the Israel Police.
Ohana, who as public security minister from May 2020 till June 2021 was responsible for both the IPS and police, said the prison service, “in terms of organizational culture, has difficulty telling the truth.”
He said he thinks the problem stems from officers’ “great fear” of speaking out. He said there were many officers who had reached the top echelons of the service, not through dedication to their mission but rather “by staying out of trouble” and keeping their names out of the newspapers.
Officers, Ohana said, are afraid of complications, afraid of public criticism — and therefore do not show initiative.
“It is true of the IPS and the police,” Ohana said according to Hebrew media reports.
Ohana also told the committee that he believed the prison service had not made technological advances in decades.
“During visits, I saw how much the IPS is a non-technological organization,” he said, describing foot patrols around prison walls that he said have not changed since the establishment of the state in 1948.
Ohana defended his choice of Israel Prisons Service chief Katy Perry, saying “she very much impressed me as an officer who thinks outside the box.
“I wanted an IPS commander to lead change,” he said. “I wanted something that would lead to changes in the technological field.”
Ohana also commented on allegations that female soldiers who were doing their military service as guards in the same Gilboa Prison were, years earlier, “pimped” to Palestinian terrorists.
Initial reports in 2018 claimed that several former female guards at the prison said they had been used as bargaining chips with inmates and deliberately placed in harm’s way by their superiors in order to make the prisoners more malleable.
“Intelligence is a dark world and unpleasant things are done in it, but the phenomenon of using our women to perhaps obtain intelligence, or for the sake of overall calm, is despicable and degrading and forbidden,” Ohana said.
The daring escape last September, which ended with the capture of the last two escaped inmates some two weeks later, has been seen as a major failure and embarrassment to Israel’s Prisons Service. The prisoners reportedly dug a tunnel for months before the prison break, using plates, panhandles, building debris and part of a metal hanger.
Perry has deflected responsibility for the prison break and during her own testimony last month slammed Gilboa Prison warden Freddy Ben Shitrit.
Ben Shitrit claimed in November he was “marked” by Perry as “the person responsible for the incident,” and said she attempted to oust him even before the investigation.
Five of the six inmates who escaped were members of the Islamic Jihad terror group, along with notorious Fatah terrorist Zakaria Zubeidi. Several had been convicted of capital crimes and were serving life terms.
The escape exposed a series of lapses at the prison, including a failure to learn lessons from previous escape attempts and several operational blunders, such as unmanned watchtowers and sleeping guards.
