Many terrorists released by Israel are millionaires, flush with cash from years of receiving monthly Palestinian Authority “pay for slay” stipends, an analysis by a Jerusalem-based watchdog group revealed on Wednesday.

Palestinian Media Watch posted a list of all 734 terrorists scheduled for release from Israeli prisons in the first phase of the hostages-for-ceasefire agreement with Hamas, together with their “salaries”—the dollar amounts each terrorist received from the Palestinian Authority’s so-called Martyrs’ Fund while incarcerated.

In total, the terrorists received $141,837,087, or more than half a billion shekels. Of those, 316, or nearly half, received more than a million shekels. (Palestinian Media Watch created a program to crunch the numbers, inputting all the relevant P.A. criteria—crime, marital status, number of children, etc., to determine the size of their stipends.)

“It’s a tremendous force driving terror,” Itamar Marcus, Palestinian Media Watch’s founder and director, told JNS.

First, it signals to Palestinians that these terrorists weren’t working in a vacuum, but were acting in the name of the P.A.

Second, the wealth places the terrorists in an honored position in Palestinian society, in fact, “Palestinian terrorists are the most honored people in Palestinian society,” he said.

“When they’re introduced, and in interviews, even years after they were released from jail, they’re called Asra [“Prisoner”]. That’s their title. It’s like an ambassador. It’s actually similar to POW [prisoner of war]. They have a different word for criminal prisoners. For the P.A., they’re legitimate fighters, even if they killed women and children,” Marcus said.

“In another society, if a criminal goes to jail for murdering someone, he’s ashamed about it. In the Palestinian Authority, they go around with a crown on their heads,” he said.

The P.A.’s ongoing “pay-for-slay” program demonstrates that Israel’s efforts to curtail it have not succeeded. In July 2018, Israel, which collects tax and tariff revenue of behalf of the P.A., passed a law withholding those funds equal to the amount the P.A. paid to terrorists. The law aimed to put an end to the practice.

The P.A. declared that payments would go on. P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas said in October 2019, “The Martyrs and their families are sacred, [and so are] the wounded and the prisoners. We must pay all of them. If one penny remains in our hands it is for them and not for the living.”

Abbas has made good on his pledge. Marcus told JNS that the P.A. has not paid its employees their full salaries—”at one point they skipped a whole month, which they’ve never made up”—to ensure imprisoned terrorists were paid in full.

“What’s outrageous, of course, is a person who’s living at home, working, who’s got five or six kids and needs the money—his salary you’re cutting to 70%. But the prisoner who’s getting everything—all his food and everything taken care of by Israel—that’s the one who’s getting 100%. So it’s just a message of values,” Marcus said.

In response, Palestinian Media Watch spearheaded a campaign in 2020 together with the IDF to effect a change whereby much of Israel’s Anti-Terror Law would be applied to Judea and Samaria, “rendering banks liable to punishment for facilitating P.A. terror salaries.”

It worked to a degree. It sent the P.A. into crisis as it realized its banks would be exposed to international terror financing laws. “According to the official statements that we got, 33,000 bank accounts were closed,” Marcus said.

As a temporary workaround, the P.A. paid the terrorists’ families through the post office. (The families complained about the indignity of having to wait in line to receive their stipends, Marcus noted.)

Then the P.A. opened a special bank dedicated solely to receiving the funds from the P.A. “The only thing that this bank does is pay terrorist salaries,” he said.

Marcus’s suggestion is to arrest anyone in the P.A. involved in the “pay-for-slay” program, even if that means arresting the entire staff at the P.A.’s Ministry of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs.

“They should all be arrested, put in jail, charged. And that would stop it very quickly,” he said.

Image -  Nasser Ishtayeh/Flash90