An Israeli district court on Sunday evening approved the government’s seizure of tens of thousands of shekels that the imprisoned terrorist Fakhri Zahir Mansour Omar received from the Palestinian Authority (PA) as a salary and rejected his father’s petition on the subject, setting a legal precedent for further similar seizures.
Mansour Omar was involved in an attack and transported the terrorist who carried out the attack on the market in Hadera in October 2005 in which six Israelis were killed.
The seizure order that allowed the money to be taken is part of a precedent-setting move initiated by the National Headquarters on Terrorist Economic Counter-Terrorism at the Ministry of Defense to issue seizure orders for salaries paid by the PA to terrorists.
Israel has recently begun to confiscate the monthly stipends paid by the PA to convicted terrorists with Israeli citizenship and their families
This move has so far led to the seizure and forfeiture of hundreds of thousands of shekels in other operations.
The PA has a policy of paying the families of convicted terrorists imprisoned in Israel, including Arabs with Israeli citizenship. The payments have been criticized as a financial incentive to commit terrorist attacks against Israelis.
According to the PA’s pay scale, the salary of an imprisoned terrorist begins at NIS 1,400 ($401) every month from his first day in prison, and gradually rises to NIS 12,000 ($3,435), in accordance with the amount of time he has been in prison.
Therefore, the more severe the attack was, the higher the stipend the terrorist is set to receive.
Terrorist prisoners who are married, have children, or are Israeli citizens or residents of eastern Jerusalem receive a special addition to the base salary.