The Gaza prisoner affairs ministry has called on local media not to reproduce Israeli media hype that Palestinian prisoners communicate with the outside world using social networking sites on the internet.Note that Ashqar doesn't deny that Palestinian Arab prisoners are on Facebook, just that he wants to censor Arab media from mentioning it.
Israel tries to convince the world that the Palestinians enjoy all their rights while Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was captured in Gaza, is denied visits and access to family, the ministry’s media director Riyadh al-Ashqar said in a statement on Saturday.
Ashqar added that Israel also uses such rumors to justify the prison authority’s frequent violent raids on prisoners’ cells in search of mobile phones.
Ashqar expressed surprise that Palestinian news outlets would reproduce such reports despite the ulterior motives behind them.
The good part? The story was not broken by Ma'ariv (which published it on Wednesday) - but by Al-Arabiya, which printed it last Monday!
So it was Arab reporters who came up with this Zionist propaganda to begin with!
(h/t Gaia K)