Israeli woman who infiltrated Syria flees government facility

Young woman who was returned to Israel from Syria in a Russia-brokered exchange flees the center where she was being treated.

By Paul Shindman, World Israel News

The young Israeli woman who crossed the border into Syria and was returned in a Russian-mediated prisoner swap was reported missing from a government treatment center, Channel 11 reported Monday.

The formerly ultra-Orthodox young woman was reported missing from the Welfare Ministry treatment center where she had been living in lieu of being held in jail while awaiting trial on several charges against her for illegally crossing the border into an enemy country.

Earlier this year, the 25-year-old woman from the town of Modi’in Illit managed to enter Syria after climbing over an electronic fence in the Golan Heights and then walking to a Syrian village.

Israeli soldiers monitoring the border failed to intercept her because they are trained to look for infiltrators into Israel and were not expecting an Israeli to walk into war-torn Syria.

The woman was arrested by Syrian security forces and eventually released in a deal brokered by Moscow. On return to Israel she was arrested and charged, although most of the details of the case, including her identity, are under a court-imposed publication ban.

Officials at the institute where the woman was being held notified police, who are searching for her. Before she crossed into Syria, she posted a note on her Facebook page saying that “no fence will stop [her].”

In the deal, Israel released two Syrian prisoners and commuted the sentence of a resident of the Druze town of Majdal Shams on the Syrian border, who had been convicted of anti-Israel incitement.

Another prisoner, convicted terrorist Diyab Qahmuz, who was sentenced to 14 years in jail for helping the Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon, refused to be deported to Damascus. Qahmuz said he preferred to stay in jail in Israel, apparently fearing the interrogation he would likely have received by Syria’s intelligence agency, which routinely uses beatings and torture.

The Lebanese Al Manar news agency reported that the young woman had previously been observed on the Lebanese border during a period of high tension between the IDF and Hezbollah.

According to the report, the incident took place last October, when the IDF was on high alert for a possible Hezbollah attack in retaliation for the assassination of a senior Hezbollah member in Syria three months earlier.

Hezbollah forces, who have been in Syria bolstering the regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad, documented the incident, but refrained from opening fire on her.