JNS
The Palestinian Authority is playing a shell game, where it shifts around resources to make it look that it’s not behind the terror payment program, according to observers.
The decree by the Palestinian Authority on Monday that it has restructured its terrorist payment program has been widely misrepresented as signaling the end of its pay-for-slay program, long-time observers told JNS, noting that reports of pay-for-slay’s demise are greatly exaggerated.
The announcement, published on the P.A.’s English-language WAFA news site, said the P.A. was transferring its payment allocation system from a ministry to an "independent" foundation.
It didn’t mention ending pay for slay, or what it calls its “Martyrs’ Fund,” in which Arabs, many of whom sit in Israeli prisons, are rewarded stipends for having carried out attacks against Jews.
Itamar Marcus, founder and director of watchdog group Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), told JNS of a telling exchange between Fatah, the ruling party of the P.A., and Hamas.
Hamas, criticizing the move, said that Fatah, the ruling party of the P.A., had abandoned the “martyrs,” i.e. prisoners.
“Sons of the Homeland,” a Telegram channel used by Fatah's Bethlehem branch took umbrage at Hamas for publishing a “truncated version of the news”—that is, mispresenting the report to suggest that the P.A. was, in fact, canceling payments to terrorists.
Marcus quoted the Fatah-aligned channel: “The full news states that the salaries of the martyrs and printers have not and will not be affected, as all families that previously benefited from the law, regulations and systems will continue to be subject to the same standards.”
“Translation: the P.A. continues to fund and reward terrorism,” Marcus said.
‘Three-card Mahmoud’
Lt. Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch, director of the Initiative for Palestinian Authority Accountability and Reform in the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, told JNS that the P.A. is merely playing “a shell game, three-card monte, or if you will, three-card Mahmoud.”
The P.A. has tried pulling the wool over Western eyes before, Hirsch said. In 2014, when the pay-for-slay program first made news and the P.A. felt that its funding was threatened, it declared that it was closing the Ministry of Prisons and no longer paying terrorist salaries.
“They announced it with great fanfare,” recalled Marcus. “What we saw internally was that they were opening in its place a PLO Commission of Prisoners. The Minister of Prisoners was going to be the Commissioner of Prisoners, and all the staff, all the buildings and the money were going to be the same but it wouldn’t be from the P.A.
“We're all convinced something similar is happening now,” Marcus added, noting that Abbas is politically weak and Hamas is very popular because of its mass slaughter of Israelis. Abbas wouldn’t risk appearing to “hurt” the prisoners, he said. (Prisoner payments are extremely popular among the Arab public in P.A.-controlled areas with 91% supporting them, according to a 2017 poll.)
‘A wave of lawsuits’
Driving the timing of the P.A.’s announcement are a number of factors, the first of which is fear of liability.
It’s for this reason that the payment system is being transferred from a P.A. ministry to the so-called Palestinian National Economic Empowerment Foundation, described in the WAFA statement as an “independent legal personality.” Notably, it will be managed by a “board of trustees appointed by the president [Abbas].”
“They don't want to be exposed to lawsuits in the States, and they would love to get the money that Israel is deducting in Israel,” Marcus said, referring to a 2018 Knesset law that ordered tax revenue Israel collects from the P.A. withheld to an amount equal to that which the P.A. pays to terrorists.
Hirsch agreed that the P.A.’s primary motive is to avoid liability, noting that the P.A. is reportedly asking behind closed doors for the U.S. to repeal the Taylor Force Act, which cuts financial aid to the P.A. until it ends payments to terrorists and their families.
Also on the liability front, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear an appeal in the coming months over whether the P.A. and Palestinian Liberation Organization can be sued in U.S. courts, Hirsch said.
In 2015, plaintiffs in one of the cases, which the court will hear jointly with another, were awarded $218.5 million, automatically trebled to more than $650 million under America’s Anti-Terrorism Act. (The sum amounted to a significant portion of the P.A.’s annual budget at the time—$4.2 billion.)
That decision was overturned by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. But the U.S. Congress has since changed the law. “They enacted the Anti-Terrorism Clarification Act of 2018. which said that if you are a country or a body that receives U.S aid, you cannot deny jurisdiction in the courts,” Hirsch said.
In the last two weeks, a slew of amicus briefs were filed with the Supreme Court, Hirsch noted, “including a position from the Department of Justice supporting the law, saying that it is clearly constitutional and that the court should override the lower court's decision.”
There have also been recent laws in Israel smoothing the way for suing terror sponsors, including one that went into effect in the summer of 2024 establishing compensation of 10 million shekels ($2.8 million) for someone murdered by terrorists and 5 million shekels ($1.4 million) for a person who suffered a disability due to terror.
“There has been a wave of lawsuits against the P.A. under that law,” Hirsch said.
As recently as Sunday, the Jerusalem District Court put a freeze on $760 million in P.A. funds following a lawsuit filed by hundreds of victims of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
The P.A. understands that the strategy of bankrupting terrorism is working, Hirsh said.
