PAY FOR SLAY CONTINUES

Report unmasks PA’s methods to continue terror stipends

Former terrorist prisoners were added to PA pension rolls or found jobs with P.A. security forces or civil service, according to Palestinian Media Watch.

 

By David Isaac  

 

Israel Today

Feb 9, 2026

 

 

 

The Palestinian Authority has been engaged in a years-long deception, pretending to halt its pay-for-slay program by various means in order to hoodwink international donors, according to a report released by a Jerusalem-based watchdog group on Sunday.

The Palestinian Media Watch report found that the PA’s “Martyr’s Fund,” the program which provides monthly stipends for those imprisoned in Israel for attacks against Israelis, is still going strong.

The Palestinian Authority announced last year that it had stopped pay-for-slay, Itamar Marcus, founder and director of Palestinian Media Watch, told JNS, explaining the reason PMW released the report.

“In fact, the terrorists who were in prison, of which there are a few thousand, actually did receive lower [pay-for-slay] payments in the last few months. That’s why we had to release this report, to show the hidden salaries,” he said.

According to PMW, the PA paid 23,500 terrorists a total of about $315 million in 2025.

The money is delivered through two programs, according to PMW.

The first adds released terrorist prisoners to the pension rolls, or finds them jobs with the PA security forces and civil service. There are more than 10,000 terrorists receiving terror stipends this way. They accounted for more than $230 million in PA funds last year.

The second program is for terrorists living outside PA-controlled territories, what the PA calls the Palestinian “diaspora.” There are 13,500 recipients in this program, who receive $86 million annually, according to PMW.

“They’re all still getting their money and it’s hidden from international scrutiny. The international community isn’t checking what the PLO is disseminating in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. The international community also isn’t looking into who’s getting salaries in the civil service and who’s on pension, and that’s where the PA is hiding all of its people on pay-for-slay,” said Marcus.

In February 2025, to divert public scrutiny, PA President Mahmoud Abbas announced that the Palestinian Authority would no longer make payments through its Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs. Payments would instead go through a new body, the Palestinian National Economic Empowerment Institution (PNEEI), under the Ministry of Social Development.

The Palestinian Authority claimed PNEEI ended pay-for-slay because Palestinian prisoners would not receive money for their violent acts but instead based on their socioeconomic status.

Although PMW showed at the time that this was a transparent attempt to fool Western donors, some Western journalists accepted the PA’s claim that it had reformed.

PMW’s report threw doubt on whether the PNEEI is even operating. According to a Sept. 20, 2025 Telegram messaging app post by a released terrorist, when he asked whether a released prisoner with military rank in the PA forces still needed to register with PNEEI, he was told it didn’t exist.

“I called the Commission of Prisoners and Released Prisoners about this … they told me that the situation regarding released prisoners has returned to how it was before. According to the old system, that is. What is called the PNEEI is cancelled. That’s what they told me. I contacted them a little while ago,” he said.

The number of pay-for-slay recipients will increase to about 30,000 this year as 6,000 more individuals have been added as “pensioners,” according to PMW.

“Just this past week, we found conversations between recipients of pay-for-slay. They were discussing the fact that the PA told them that there are 6,000 people who were moved from public pay-for-slay to pensions and PA jobs. Those in the group were a bit frustrated that it wasn’t any of them,” said Marcus.

The PMW report offered insight into the development of the PA’s deception. Some PA moves were a direct result of PMW investigations. In 2020, a PMW expose revealed that 7,000 to 8,000 unemployed former terrorist prisoners were receiving pay-for-slay salaries.

“At the end of 2020, we saw an interview on Palestinian Authority TV with Minister of Prisoners Issa Karake,” said Marcus. “He talked about the tremendous expense that the Palestinian Authority had paying salaries for those 7,000 to 8,000 released prisoners. We published that immediately. Then the United States and Europe said, ‘What’s going on? Why are you paying all these released prisoners?’”

To give the payments a veneer of legitimacy, Abbas issued a Presidential Order in Feb. 2021 that security and civil service jobs be found for all released prisoners who had been imprisoned for at least five years.

A month after Abbas’s order, the Palestinian Authority created a 64-person committee that worked “even on vacation days,” according to Sada News, a Palestinian news agency, to find positions for the released terrorists so that the visible pay-for-slay budget would be reduced.

When the PA realized it would be impossible to find positions for all the terrorists, it hit on another idea—to add them to the pension rolls, according to PMW.

As PA law only provided for PA government pensions to go to PA and PLO employees, Abbas decreed that released terrorist prisoners would be eligible as well, their time in prison to be treated as civil service employment.

First, the decree applied to those 60 or older. But that left many thousands under age 60 without jobs and pensions, so two months later Abbas lowered the pension age for released terrorists to 50.

By Oct. 2021, the Palestinian Authority said it had successfully disguised all 7,000 to 8,000 released terrorists who were receiving salaries from the Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs.

“The PA’s greatest depravity is not the hundreds of millions of dollars it spends rewarding terrorists through its pay-for-slay programs. The PA’s policy of rewarding terror is merely a symptom, however repugnant, of its deep and fundamental turpitude—its portrayal of terrorism and the killing of Jews as the highest acts, done in the name of Palestinians and Allah,” said PMW.

“The PA elevates murderers of Israelis to the apex of Palestinian society, presenting them as the ultimate Palestinian heroes, and thus honors and rewards them,” it said, noting Abbas’s remarks from February 2021 expressing this twisted idea: “Prisoners and Martyrs … are more precious than all of us.”