In accordance with its “pay-for-slay” law, the Palestinian Authority last year paid terrorists and their families over $347 million, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said Tuesday.
Citing the PA’s own data, terrorists with three to five year prison sentences receive $580 dollars a month – equivalent to the average Palestinian income, Liberman told a session of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Tuesday.
Terrorists sentenced to 20 years or more – usually for the murder of Israeli civilians – receive more than $2,900 per month for their entire lives, five times the amount of a “small time” terrorist.
On top of the PA salary, Arab terrorists who hold Israeli citizenship receive a $145 bonus, more than the average Israeli income of around $2,700.
In addition, there are additional stipends for wives and children.
Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said, “The PA pays over a billion shekels a year to terrorists and their families, thus encouraging and perpetuating terrorism.”
“The minute the amount of the payment is decided according to the severity of the crime and the length of the sentence – in other words, whoever murders and is sentenced to life in prison gets much more – that is funding terrorist attacks against Israeli citizens. There is nothing that better illustrates the PA’s support for terrorism. We must stop this,” he added.
Liberman also presented his bill proposing to deduct the amount paid by the Palestinian Authority to terrorists and their families from monies owed by Israel in taxes.
The PA has paid out NIS 4 billion ($1.12 billion) over the past four years towards terrorist salaries, as per PA law. According to Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, who served as the director general of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, the longer a Palestinian security prisoner is jailed, “the higher the salary. … Anyone who has sat in prison for more than 30 years gets NIS 12,000 ($3,360) per month.”
The Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee will hold a session to discuss the bill Tuesday, prior to the Defense Ministry’s submission based on an initial draft drawn up by Yesh Atid MK Elazar Stern in March.
Stern said he was “glad to hear Defense Minister Liberman adopting my bill, which is supported by all the security bodies in the State of Israel,” the report said.
“The time has come for the State of Israel to put an end to the PA’s encouragement of terrorism,” he said. “I hope this bill will be promoted quickly and will be brought to a vote in the Knesset in the coming days.”
The legislation is based on the Taylor Force Act, American legislation that would cut U.S. funding to the Palestinian Authority so long as it continues to provide financial support to the families of perpetrators of attacks against Israelis and Israeli-Americans.
The bill is named after former U.S. Army veteran and Vanderbilt University graduate student Taylor Force, who was killed in a stabbing attack while he toured Tel Aviv with his school in March 2016.
In August, Breitbart Jerusalem reported that PA President Mahmoud Abbas told President Donald Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner that he wouldn’t stop payments to convicted terrorists until his “dying day.”
After his meeting with Kushner, Abbas issued a statement on Facebook in which he vowed again: “I will never stop [paying] the allowances to the families of the prisoners and released prisoners, even if this costs me my position and my presidency.”
“I will pay them until my dying day,” he added.
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