JERUSALEM, June 19: A jailed militant from the Islamic Jihad group who broke out of an Israeli prison near the West Bank city of Ramallah on Saturday was recaptured just hours later, Israeli military sources said.

The 24-year-old militant escaped from the Ofer prison camp, just west of Ramallah, by climbing over the fence, the sources said without identifying him.

Some 12 hours later, he was arrested by troops at a checkpoint on a road just east of Ramallah.

In another incident, a unit of undercover soldiers entered the Qalandia refugee camp south of Ramallah, surrounded a coffee shop and arrested five men linked to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, Palestinian security sources and witnesses said. Two of the men were said to be wanted.

Israeli security sources confirmed the operation but said only one person had been arrested, an activist from the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a radical Fatah offshoot.

Further north, about 50 military jeeps rolled into the Askar refugee camp in Nablus and imposed a curfew.-AFP