A senior Palestinian Authority (PA) official claims Jewish prisoners got better treatment from the Nazis than Palestinian prisoners currently receive in Israel.

Israeli prisons are worse than "the Auschwitzes (sic) of the Nazis," PA Deputy Minister of Prison Affairs Ziad Abu Ein declared in an interview last week with Fatah Television, Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) reported. Israel forgets "that we are now in the 21st century and that the conditions of our Palestinian prisoners are worse than the Auschwitzes of the Nazis, where Jewish detainees were held."

Comparing Israelis to Nazis is a recurring theme in PA media under PA President Mahmoud Abbas, according to PMW.

The PA newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida ran a July 5 story on the treatment of Palestinian Shahids (martyrs)declaring that "even more serious are acts which even the Nazis and the fascists did not commit at the height of their arrogance and hatred for humanity, such as the imprisonment of pregnant women together with their children" and other actions "which are considered crimes against humanity."

In June, the same newspaper reported that a PA official in Bethlehem told visiting British members of Parliament that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians was even more disturbing than Nazi persecution of Jews. "While the Jews experienced a holocaust over a limited period in history, the Palestinians have experienced a continuous and ongoing holocaust for 63 years, and yet this nation has not found a supporter who will halt this holocaust," he said.

The assertion that Israelis are behaving in a Hitlerian fashion is belied by actual Palestinian inmate accounts of prison life. PMW reported last year that a growing number of prisoners were receiving doctorates and other degrees while behind bars in Israel. Many prisoners had registered for courses at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Al-Hayat Al-Jadida even reported last October that since 2000, "more than 10,000 Palestinian prisoners have attained matriculation certificates while still in the occupation prisons."

Last June, Fatah TV interviewed a former prisoner on the day of his release. Despite the interviewer's best efforts to get him to say prisoners were brutalized by Israel, the man refused to depict Palestinian inmates as victims of the Zionists. "By Allah, the guys in the prison are fine. They lack nothing. They are doing fine," he said.