by WorldTribune Staff, October 2, 2017
The Palestinian Authority (PA) will continue to pay terrorists and their families, PA leader Mahmoud Abbas said.
“Israel and the U.S. say that this is supporting terrorism…I will not back down on this issue. The families of the martyrs will continue to receive their allowances in full,” Abbas said in an interview with Al-Quds Al-Arabi.
“Israel incites the U.S. to see prisoners and martyrs as terrorists,” Abbas said. “They are soldiers and the sons of our nation…and they are the martyrs of the Palestinian people. And since then (1965), we have provided them [and their families] with allowances.”
The PA, according to its own figures, has paid $158 million to terrorists in Israeli prisons this year. The monthly allowance per prisoner is higher than that of an active member of the PA security forces.
“Israel and the U.S. have pressed the PA to halt its payments to terrorists for years on the grounds that the policy encourages Arabs to attack Israelis,” Israel’s Arutz Sheva reported on Oct. 1. “The PA policy of paying higher salaries to terrorists serving longer sentences means that the more heinous and deadly the terror attack, the more the terrorist is rewarded by the PA for committing murder.”
A bill currently under consideration in the U.S. Congress would cut American funding to the PA as long as it continued the payments to terrorists and their families.
The Taylor Force Act is named after Taylor Force, a former U.S. Army officer who was murdered in a stabbing attack in 2016 while walking along the Jaffa boardwalk in Tel Aviv.
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