‘At least NIS 230m. paid by PA to families of terrorists’
The PA is paying no less than NIS 732 million in financial rewards to terrorists and their relatives, a Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) report has revealed.
The report is based on data gathered from the B’Tselem organization in combination with information from the Palestinian Authority, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) and noted historians. It is an update to a study the organization released earlier this month that looked at the amount of money being paid by the PA to terrorists who are in Israeli prisons and terrorists who were jailed and are currently free.
This report now ads the layer of relatives of dead terrorists who receive a monthly stipend and wounded terrorists.
“This is a much more difficult category to understand,” said Maurice Hirsch, a lawyer with PMW who prepared the report over the last three weeks.
Hirsch said the PA allocated NIS 1.2 billion to its annual budget for rewarding terrorists and people wounded or killed in both terrorism and non-terrorism related incidents. Around NIS 502 m. was used to pay prisoners and released prisoners. The rest was used for the families of the dead and the wounded. However, this amount includes payments not only to those who died or were hurt carrying out an attack, but also to non-combatants.
Furthermore, unlike how the eligibility of both jailed and released terrorists to receive a monthly salary as well as their additional rights are determined by the PA’s laws and regulations, which are published publicly, the money paid to the families of dead terrorists is not determined by those laws but rather by the PLO’s internal practices.
“The PA does not release statistics on this subject,” said Hirsch. “There is... a [complete] blackout on the whole thing.”
PMW calculated that in 2018, the PA spent a minimum of NIS 230 m. on payments to families of dead terrorists.
The NGO likewise uncovered a rare interview with the secretary-general of the National Association of the Families of Martyrs of Palestine, Muhammad Sbeihat, that revealed a list of the lifetime payments to families of terrorist martyrs. This included NIS 6,000 paid immediately, NIS 1,400 per month for life and additions based on family dynamics – NIS 400 extra per month per wife, NIS 200 per child, NIS 300 if the terrorist was a resident of Jerusalem, and NIS 300 if he or she was an Israeli resident.
The report comes less than a week after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that his government will for the first time implement a law that allows it to deduct money from the taxes and tariffs it collects monthly on behalf of the PA, which then uses it to pay security prisoners and families of Palestinians who were killed while carrying out attacks against Israelis.
The amount that is going to be deducted is expected to be announced on Sunday.
Hirsch said the Defense Ministry will reveal the amount of its deduction, which is likely to be much higher than PMW’s number because the ministry has greater access to intelligence information. He said that the organization prepared its report because it is likely that much of the government’s report will be classified and their report can help shed light on the government calculation.
“This gives a minimum estimate that can be shown in open sources,” Hirsch said.
He added that the problem is: “We have a situation of pay