Israeli forces on Saturday said they have arrested four of the six Palestinian prisoners who made a dramatic escape from a maximum-security Israeli jail on Monday. According to a police spokesperson, the men (in pair) were found hiding in a truck parking lot in the northern Arab village of Shibli–Umm al-Ghanam, near the city of Nazareth.

The arrests moved Israel closer to closing an embarrassing episode that exposed deep flaws in its prison system and turned the fugitive prisoners into Palestinian heroes. Late on Friday, Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired a rocket into Israel in an apparent sign of solidarity, drawing Israeli airstrikes in reprisal.

The six Palestinians tunneled out of the Gilboa prison on Monday, setting off a furious manhunt across Israel and in the West Bank.

The four wanted men were caught in a pair of arrests at the same place in northern Israel.

One of the men captured on Saturday morning was the notorious terror commander Zakaria Zubeidi, a high-profile former commander of Fatah’s Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades group in the West Bank city of Jenin.

While he has been linked to attacks on Israelis, he also was well known for giving frequent media interviews and for a friendship he once had with an Israeli woman. Zubeidi over the years had received amnesty and taken college courses and was active in a West Bank theater movement before he was re-arrested in 2019 on suspicions of involvement in attacks.

Photos released by police showed Zubeidi, handcuffed and wearing a white blindfold, being led away by two police officers. While Zubeidi was a member of the secular Fatah group, the others belonged to the Islamic Jihad militant group, including four serving life sentences. All of the prisoners are from the nearby city of Jenin in the Israel-occupied West Bank.

In a statement, police said that Israeli security forces, including the military, have been working “around the clock” to catch the fugitives.

“All of the forces were deployed at full strength, searched in open areas, collected every piece of information until they succeeded in solving the puzzle to locate these two fugitives,” including Zubeidi, police said. The search for the final two prisoners was continuing.

Earlier, two other prisoners were arrested in Nazareth, an Arab city in northern Israel just west of Umm al-Ghanam.

According to Israeli media reports, residents in both towns had turned in the prisoners.