This article originally appeared in the Jerusalem Post on May 27, 2025.
A recent report quoting Israeli security sources attributed the relative reduction in terror in the West Bank to more stringent prison conditions.
“If, in the past, we saw young Palestinians entering Israeli prisons to receive stipends from the Palestinian Authority while enjoying good conditions – meals, showers, and academic studies – today, the conditions in security prisons, as per National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s policy, are harsh. Terrorists are reconsidering their course of action, and [they] fear imprisonment.”
As part of the PA’s “Pay-for-Slay” policy, every Palestinian terrorist arrested by Israel is paid a monthly salary, which has two main components.
One part of the monthly salary, mandated by Article 7 of the 2004 PA Law of Prisoners and Released Prisoners, is paid directly by the authority to the terrorist and his family. This part of the salary increases over time spent in prison, starting from NIS 1,400 and rising to NIS 12,000.
The second part of the salary, mandated by Article 6 of the Law of Prisoners and Released Prisoners, includes an additional NIS 400 per month, deposited by the PA every six months into the terrorist prisoner’s account for purchasing items in the prison canteen and an additional clothing allowance.
Israeli security establishment agreed to these deposits
While it is clear that the authority deposits are an integral part of terrorists’ salaries, Israel agreed to the deposits, predominantly on the recommendation of the security forces.
For many years, the Israeli security forces rejected any change of the status quo regarding the imprisonment of terrorist prisoners. Citing the centrality of the prisoners’ issue in Palestinian discourse, the security forces warned that any changes would potentially spark wider acts of terror.
Paradoxically, but not unsurprisingly, it was the security establishment that raised most of the objections to the 2018 Israeli law that imposed punitive measures on the PA for its “Pay-for-Slay” program.
During discussions of the law in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, the security establishment cautioned that the imposition of the measure would cause the financial downfall of the PA and that if the authority payments were stopped, the terrorists would be driven into the arms of Hamas.
Despite the warnings, the law passed, and since its first implementation in 2019, Israel has deducted close to NIS 4 billion – a sum equivalent to the PA payments to the terrorists in 2018 through 2024 – from the taxes Israel collects and transfers to the authority, under the Oslo Accords. While the PA has dug its heels in and continued the payments, the touted financial demise of the authority has not materialized.
Abolition of the policy
As a result of the pressure from Israel and certain parts of the international community, in February 2025, the PA announced what it claimed was the abolition of the “Pay-for-Slay” policy. In reality, however, what the authority did was implement another hoax to mislead the international community.
While Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas was quick to clarify that despite his presidential decree, the payments to the terrorists would continue, the Qatari-owned news outlet The New Arab has reported that some families of the imprisoned terrorists (about 16%) have received notification that they will no longer receive the payments, “based on directives from the [PA] security services.”
A PA policy paper once explained that the payments to the terrorists “are pivotal to the continued political legitimacy of the Palestinian government” and that “any withdrawal of these payments in the face of Israel’s continued mass confinement of Palestinians will certainly cause social and political unrest and upheaval.”
Since the Palestinians claim that, since 1967, “an estimated number of 800,000 Palestinians have been detained in Israeli prisons,” the number of potential recipients of the payments is huge. According to Palestinian sources, at the end of April 2025, over 10,100 Palestinian terrorists were being held in Israeli prisons.
Another central part of the “Pay-for-Slay” policy is the PA-PLO payments to wounded terrorists and the families of dead terrorists. In addition to the imprisoned terrorists and released terrorists, there are an additional 40,000 families of dead terrorists and tens of thousands of wounded terrorists who also receive payments.
Given the authority’s commitment to continue paying financial rewards to the terrorists and taking into account the centrality of the terrorist prisoner issue to Palestinian society, on the one hand, and the PA’s track record of doing the utmost to hide and conceal the “Pay-for-Slay” payments, the only way to judge whether the PA has indeed halted all the payments will be when the families of the terrorists, who have suddenly lost their primary source of income, take, en masse, to the streets to demonstrate against the PA.
The quiet on the Palestinian street on this subject is the clearest indicator that the PA has not truly stopped the payments to the terrorist prisoners, released prisoners, wounded terrorists, or the families of the dead terrorists.
