Boaz’s Clash with Police and Escape from the Ophira Station

Boaz’s clash with police and escape from the Ophira station turn a disputed arrest into a wider pursuit, exposing how quickly Boaz’s loyalty to a friend could bring him into conflict with the authorities—and how elusive he remained once in custody. The episode is preserved in an investigative report to Manfred Zakheim, which follows the trail from a stolen tour boat to a police station, then from the desert to Kiryat Arba.

The arrest and the disputed account

The report begins with events during the night of 10 to 11 June, when the tour boat on which Boaz had recently been working was stolen from the civilian anchorage at Ophira. At two in the morning it was found abandoned near Ras Muhammad, apparently having been used by Bedouin smugglers to carry hashish from the Egyptian coast. A patrol set off after the smugglers.

At dawn, around five o’clock on 11 June, police arrested Hamed Mutani, a young Bedouin who was living with Boaz at a gas station, along with three young women from abroad. The report says Hamed resisted arrest, but notes that he denied doing so. Its author also believed the police and military had beaten Hamed at the scene, while recording that they denied it. Hamed was released a few hours later after interrogators concluded he had no connection to either the boat theft or the smuggling.

Boaz intervened in the arrest. Using a tire attached to a rope, he injured nine soldiers and five members of the Ophira police force before being subdued. He was arrested and charged with obstructing a lawful arrest. His statement at the station gave a competing account: he said the arresting officers had used violence against Hamed, and that he had acted in self-defense. The report preserves the conflict between these accounts rather than resolving it.

Escape and renewed search

Less than twenty-four hours after his arrest, during the night of 11 to 12 June, Boaz escaped by breaking down a wall of the prefabricated building used as the police station. The officer on duty believed he was still wandering in the desert and might have taken shelter with Hamed, so the Ophira police continued searching in that direction.

The investigation produced a different lead. In response to Zakheim’s telephone request, Shlomo Zand flew to Sharm el-Sheikh to check the story, while his assistant, Albert Maimon, tracked Boaz’s movements. Maimon discovered that Boaz had stayed until two days before the report in a rented apartment in Kiryat Arba, near Hebron. The apartment was occupied by five unmarried religious men of American and Russian origins, members of the small right-wing organization called Jewish Fellowship. The report also notes that Michel-Henri Sommo was associated with the same cause.

Disappearance and significance

Zand’s firm informed the police of the Kiryat Arba discovery in accordance with its legal responsibility, but Boaz had disappeared again by then. The officer’s expectation that he remained in the desert had therefore led the search away from the place where he had most recently been found. The report ends with no confirmed new whereabouts and asks Zakheim whether the investigation should continue.

The episode links Boaz’s impulsive defense of Hamed to a pattern of arrest, escape, and renewed flight. Its documentary form also keeps the circumstances unsettled: the account records allegations and denials about violence, distinguishes Boaz’s own version from the investigator’s, and closes not with his recapture but with an unresolved trail.