Jewish World Update May/Jun 2026
Report Unmasks PA’s Methods to Continue Terror Stipends
by David Isaac
(JNS)—For years, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has pretended to halt its pay-for-slay program in order to hoodwink international donors.
The PA announced last year that it had stopped pay-for-slay. But the Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), a Jerusalem-based watchdog group, found that the PA’s “Martyr’s Fund,” which provides monthly stipends for those imprisoned in Israel for attacks against Israelis, is still going strong.
According to PMW, the PA paid 23,500 terrorists a total of about $315 million in 2025. The money is delivered through two programs. The first adds released terrorist prisoners to the pension rolls or finds them jobs with the PA security forces and civil service. More than 10,000 terrorists receive stipends this way, accounting for more than $230 million in PA funds last year. The second program is for terrorists living outside PA-controlled territories. The 13,500 recipients in this program receive $86 million annually.
“They’re all still getting their money, and it’s hidden from international scrutiny,” said Itamar Marcus, founder and director of PMW. “The international community isn’t checking what the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] 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.”
In February 2025, to divert public scrutiny, PA President Mahmoud Abbas announced that the PA 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 PA 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.
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.
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 exposé 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 February 2021 that security and civil service jobs be found for all released prisoners who had been imprisoned for at least five years. 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. By October 2021, the PA 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,” said PMW. “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.”
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