Jerusalem, Israel - Israeli prison officials, probing Palestinian accusations that guards had ripped pages of the Koran, said on Wednesday preliminary checks found no evidence an Islamic holy book had been damaged.
The allegations that guards tore pages of the Koran during a search earlier this week in Israel's Megiddo prison sparked fury among Palestinians, and nearly 900 prisoners at the jail were refusing food after calling a day-long fast to protest.
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, part of the Palestinian ruling Fatah party, threatened to punish Israel over what the militant group called "an insult to all Muslims".
"Total nonsense. It never happened. It was a provocation," Israeli Prisons Service Commissioner Yaakov Ganot told Israel Radio.
The Palestinian accusations coincided with anger in the Muslim world over revelations that personnel at a U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had mishandled the Koran in five cases confirmed by the U.S. military.
Violent protests erupted in some Muslim countries following the publication of a May 9 Newsweek article, later retracted by the magazine, that stated U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo had flushed a Koran down a toilet to try to make detainees talk.
An Israeli Prisons Service spokesman said prisoners at Megiddo had shown officials ripped pages along with a Koran from which they said they were torn. He said the pages were too large to have come from the book, and the Koran had appeared intact.
The Palestinian minister of prisoner affairs, Sofian Abu Zaydeh, said he was heading to the jail to look into the matter personally.
Israeli Arab legislator Mohammad Barakeh, who had visited the jail earlier, said Israel was unfairly accusing the prisoners of creating a provocation.
"I saw with my own eyes two Koran books with several pages torn from them," he told Reuters.
The Israeli Prison Service spokesman said checks were continuing. He added that the accusations stemmed from prisoners' anger over the jail search, which he said had uncovered weapons.
Palestinians demand amnesty for all 8,000 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, which says it will not free those it describes as having "blood on their hands".
Israel freed nearly 400 Palestinian prisoners last Thursday in a long delayed gesture aimed at boosting President Mahmoud Abbas. Palestinians said the move did not go far enough.