Pregnant Gazelle Found Caged Near Hebron, Now at Safari

A mountain gazelle in the late stages of pregnancy was found locked in a cage in the yard of a house in the village of Idhna, west of Hebron, and is now under veterinary care at the wildlife hospital on the grounds of the Ramat Gan Safari. Inspectors from the Israel Nature and Parks Authority took her out of the cage overnight on September 24, 2026, and a suspect was arrested at the scene.

The search was run jointly. Detectives from the Southern District Border Police central unit, Border Police officers serving in Judea and Samaria and Nature and Parks Authority inspectors attached to the Civil Administration’s nature reserves staff went to the house on intelligence supplied by the Border Police unit. Inside the yard they found an adult female gazelle, heavily pregnant, held in a cage in breach of Israeli wildlife law.

What the examination found

The gazelle was taken to the Israeli Wildlife Hospital, which sits on the grounds of the Zoological Center Tel Aviv-Ramat Gan, better known as the Ramat Gan Safari. Dr. Ruti Shviro, a veterinarian at the hospital, carried out the first examination on arrival.

The authority’s own account of that examination reads: “נמצא כי הצביה במצב גופני סביר, אך סימני השבי ניכרים בה היטב, ונראה שהעובר חיוני ושההיריון תקין, בשלב זה.” In English: “The gazelle was found to be in reasonable physical condition, but the marks of captivity are clearly evident on her, and the fetus appears viable and the pregnancy normal at this stage.” The statement was published in Hebrew by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority; the translation is ours.

That last clause is doing real work. “At this stage” is a veterinarian declining to promise an outcome, which is the honest position four days into a case like this. A wild ungulate that has been confined, handled and fed by people does not simply resume where she left off, and a pregnancy carried through that is not a pregnancy anybody can call safe yet.

The species, and what the Red List says

The mountain gazelle, Gazella gazella, is listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List in an assessment published by the IUCN SSC Antelope Specialist Group in 2017. Israel holds the largest remaining population of the species anywhere, which makes every breeding female there a meaningful fraction of a global total rather than a local statistic. A pregnant female removed from the wild is two animals, and the authority’s release says so in the plainest possible terms by reporting on the fetus at all.

The Nature and Parks Authority did not attach a conservation category to its announcement, so there is nothing here to correct. It is worth adding the assessment because it changes how the case reads: this is not a deer in a shed, it is an Endangered antelope in a shed.

Where the zoos actually sit in this

We look for the accredited zoological institution behind every conservation and rescue story in this region, and in this one it is not hiding. The Israeli Wildlife Hospital has been run jointly by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and the Ramat Gan Safari since it was founded in 2005, on the Safari’s own grounds, with support from the Ramat Gan municipality. The two bodies signed a fresh operating agreement in August 2019 to expand the building, add treatment and hospitalization space, build rehabilitation and flight areas for raptors and buy better equipment. In 2018, the last year for which the partners published a figure, the hospital treated more than 5,000 injured animals brought in from across the country.

So the enforcement is the state’s and the hospital bed is the zoo’s. That is a cleaner division than most of the funding traces we run, where the zoological money sits three organizations back and takes an afternoon to find. Here the gazelle was in a police photograph one night and in a zoological institution’s veterinary ward the next morning.

What we could not find is any accredited zoo or aquarium outside Israel funding this particular strand of work. The Nature and Parks Authority’s enforcement operations are a government function paid for as one, and we are not going to imply otherwise to fill in a field.

A pattern, not an incident

The authority has published two other confiscations in the same stretch of weeks: a gazelle fawn found being held illegally in the village of a-Ram, and an adult female gazelle recovered from a storeroom in Judea and Samaria wearing a collar and a bell around her neck. That one also went to the wildlife hospital at the Safari for treatment and tests.

A collar and a bell tell you what the holding is for. These are not animals somebody found injured and meant to help. The suspect in the Idhna case was arrested and questioned on suspicion of hunting, holding, harming and illegally trading in protected natural assets, and the Border Police have said they will keep working with the authority on the same lines.

Readers who want the other half of Israel’s gazelle and deer story can find it in our report on the Persian fallow deer released into Nahal Dolev, where the same authority is putting animals back rather than taking them out of cages. The trade side of this, and the difficulty of tracing who pays to fight it, is something we have written about before in the context of Nigeria’s vulture markets.

The Nature and Parks Authority asks anyone who knows of wild animals being held illegally to call its hotline on *3639. Its full account of the Idhna confiscation is published on its own site in Hebrew.