In a Saudi 24 TV interview, Jordanian journalist Yousef Alawnah compared his incarceration in Israel to prisons in the Arab world and said that he was ashamed by the comparison.
Alawnah recounted that he had served 30 months in an Israeli prison for smuggling explosives, adding that “prison was like an institute of education,” where inmates had “an opportunity to acquire culture, to read, and to study many things.”
Alawnah wrote for the Kuwaiti press for many years and, according to media reports, he was deported in 2016 after criticizing Iraqi Shiite leader Ayatollah Al-Sistani. He said that in the library of an Israeli prison there are 30,000 to 40,000 books, and asked: “Do the Sunni prisoners in Iraq have books to read? The prisoners held in the dungeons of the Syrian regime. ... Do you think that they have books?”
The interview was broadcast on June 12.
