by Sveta Listratov
The Palestinian Authority will pay nearly $3 million to the families of slain Hamas terrorists who slaughtered civilians in Gaza border communities on Oct. 7, Palestinian Media Watch reports.
Moreover, the Palestinian Authority will find a way to deliver the payments despite the fact that Gaza is at war and that Hamas seeks to overthrow the Ramallah government.
“The PA spends every month half of the [Martyrs Fund] budget for Gaza terrorists. We see it from the budget reports. They call it ‘South Palestine,’” PMW director Itamar Marcus told the Tazpit Press Service.
“We are used to seeing the PA and Gaza as two different things, but they sit in the same money,” Marcus stressed.
“We know that in the past, when Israel carried out operations in Gaza, and the Hamas terrorists were killed in the airstrikes, so there was suddenly a huge amount of ‘martyrs,’ but they didn’t get payments, so there were a lot of complaints about it from Gaza,” Marcus said.
“So now according to the law the PA passed, they will pay all those retroactively, starting this month together with those who carried out the attack on October 7. We don’t know when it will be done but according to the law they will receive it starting this month,” he explained.
More than 1,400 Israelis were killed and some 4,100 others were wounded, with another 199 captives — or more — taken back to Gaza.
But for the Palestinian Authority Martyr’s Fund, there are 1,500 Hamas terrorists killed inside Israel, whose families are entitled to the “pay for slay” disbursements.
Under PA law, every Palestinian Authority terrorist who is killed attacking Israelis is classified as a “martyr” and the family is rewarded with a NIS 6,000 ($1,511) grant, followed by a lifetime monthly stipend of NIS 1,400 ($353).
PMW’s report estimates that each Hamas terrorist family will receive NIS 7,400 ($1,843) for the first month and NIS 11,100,000 shekels ($2,789,430) in total for the operatives who were killed in the October 7 invasion of Israel.
In addition, there are 50 Hamas terrorists captured by Israel who participated in the massacre who will be paid at least NIS 70,000 ($17,590) in total this month.
Terrorists in Israeli prisons receive monthly stipends starting at NIS 1,400 per month. The payouts eventually increase to NIS 12,000 ($2,990) per month.
Terrorist prisoners who are married with children receive even higher payouts.
In total, the PA will pay at least NIS 11,170,000 ($2,807,021) in payments to the families of dead Hamas terrorists and to imprisoned Hamas terrorists who participated in the Oct. 7 massacre.
PMW stressed that this was a conservative estimate, because as the war continues Israeli forces will kill and capture more terrorists.
“The Palestinian Authority should be sending a big thank you to the European Union countries and Norway, currently the largest funders of the PA, because the PA could not possibly make these terror payments without them,” Palestinian Media Watch pointed out.
“These donor countries like to pretend that it’s not their money rewarding terrorists, but everyone knows that the PA could not reward terrorists without this generous foreign funding. When payments to teachers, police and street cleaners are covered by international donors, the PA has the hundreds of millions available it needs to pay for terror,” the NGO said.
Jerusalem regularly offsets an equivalent amount from taxes that Israel collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority.
A comparison of the amount of US aid provided to the Palestinian Authority with the number of people killed in Palestinian terror attacks found that American financial support “fuels terror, not peace,” according to a PMW study released in March.
Ramallah has been paying out the “pay for slay” stipends to imprisoned terrorists and the families of Palestinians killed while carrying out terror attacks for years. But the issue came under scrutiny following the murder of Taylor Force, an American citizen was killed in a 2016 stabbing spree by 21-year-old Bashar Masalha in Jaffa.
Force’s murder became a high profile event because he was a US citizen, and because he was killed near the Peres Center for Peace while then-Vice President Joe Biden was meeting with former Israeli President Shimon Peres.
Masalha was killed by responding security personnel, but reports later surfaced that his family in Qalqilya was receiving special payouts from the PA.
