Is U.S. Aid to the Palestinian Authority Fueling Terror?

Vol. 25, No. 14

• On July 10, 2025, Shalev Zvuluny, 22, was murdered outside a Gush Etzion shopping center by Mahmoud Abed and Malek Salem, both members of the Palestinian Authority (PA) police. The U.S. continues to provide the PA with tens of millions of dollars a year, more than six years after the Taylor Force Act conditioned most U.S. aid to the PA.
• The State Department has set aside $46.5 million for civilian-security projects in the PA in fiscal 2025, up from last year’s $40 million. The PA received nearly $1 billion from this program between 2007 and 2023. Most of this money covered routine operations and maintenance for Palestinian Authority security forces, with smaller amounts covering advisory services, light-armored vehicles, communications rentals, and equipment upgrades.
• The Taylor Force Act (2018) blocks only Economic Support Fund (ESF) assistance to the PA. Under the Act, ESF remains frozen until the PA abolishes its “Pay-for-Slay” policy, which provides salaries and stipends to terrorists and their families as a reward for killing Israelis and otherwise participating in terror, stops incitement to terror, and actively fights terror. Civilian-security aid, allocated under a different budgetary provision, was never affected.
• While U.S. officials continue to characterize the PA security forces as a “moderate, professional” partner, its personnel have repeatedly participated in or facilitated terror attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF soldiers. According to senior PLO official Jibril Rajoub, PA security personnel account for 12% of all Palestinian terrorists held by Israel. Some 78 PA security personnel were recorded either executing, attempting, or directly enabling terrorist attacks between 2020 and 2024.
• The U.S. goal for this funding was to strengthen the PA security forces in the aftermath of the Hamas victory in the 2006 PA elections, and improve their effectiveness in fighting terror. In practice, however, the funding was used by the PA to train terrorists who are and were members of its security forces.
• At the very least, the U.S. administration should reevaluate its continued funding to the PA to ensure that it is not facilitating terror. Such funding should be conditioned on the PA desisting from terror incitement, terror promotion, and terror rewarding.

On Thursday, July 10, 2025, Shalev Zvuluny, 22, was murdered in a terror attack outside a Gush Etzion shopping center. The terrorists who carried out the attack were identified as Mahmoud Abed and Malek Salem, both members of the Palestinian Authority (PA) police. Salem was a graduate of a military college in Qatar.

While many are under the misconception that the United States has ceased all funding to the PA, the truth is that even under President Trump, it continues to provide the PA with tens of millions of dollars a year. More than six years after the Taylor Force Act conditioned most U.S. aid to the PA, American funding to Ramallah is still flowing at full force.

The State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics Control & Law Enforcement (INCLE), an account whose aim is to promote worldwide security cooperation, has set aside $46.5M for the PA in fiscal 2025, up from last year’s $40M.

INCLE, an account whose funds are managed and implemented into programs by the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL), bankrolls overseas counter-drug and civilian-security projects. It can tap Pentagon resources for gear, services, and training, which are delivered through U.S. security-cooperation channels. Since its inception in 2007, INCLE has kept money flowing to the PA – nearly $1 billion between 2007 and 2023.

INCLE Allocations vs Actual Obligations 2007-2025

*FY 2025 figures current as of July 9, 2025.

Federal spending records show that in FY 2025, INCLE funds are already flowing. Following President Trump’s lift of a total freeze on all U.S. foreign aid that ended in May, about $1.8M has already been obligated. ForeignAssistance.gov, an official database that tracks U.S. foreign aid transactions, indicates that most of this money covered routine operations and maintenance for Palestinian Authority Security Forces (hereinafter PASF) units, with smaller amounts covering advisory services, light-armored vehicles, communications rentals, and equipment upgrades. More than $44M remains unobligated and can still be committed before the fiscal year ends.

INCLE Amounts Obligated to the PA in 2025

Why INCLE Funds are Allowed Under the Taylor Force Act (2018)

INCLE funding was never touched by the 2018 halt on direct aid to the PA. This is because the Taylor Force Act (2018), a law passed after the 2016 murder of 28-year-old U.S. army veteran Taylor Allen Force by a Palestinian terrorist in Israel, blocks only Economic Support Fund (ESF) assistance that “directly benefits” the PA. Under the Act, ESF remains frozen until the PA abolishes its “Pay-for-Slay” policy, which provides salaries and stipends to terrorists and their families as a reward for killing Israelis and otherwise participating in terror, stops incitement to terror, and actively fights terror.⁸

As opposed to the ESF aid, the INCLE aid, allocated under a different budgetary provision, was never affected. As a result, this stream of funding remains open into 2025 even though the PA has not abandoned its program to promote, incentivize, and reward terror.⁹

The continued exemption of the INCLE aid from the Taylor Force Act is no longer tenable for at least three reasons:

1. U.S. taxpayers are now, in essence, unknowingly subsidizing the same defendants that American terror victims are now entitled to sue.

In June 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act (PSJVTA). The decision confirmed that both the PA and the PLO may be sued in U.S. courts when they pay, or otherwise incentivize, terrorists who kill Americans or operate on U.S. soil.¹⁰ The justices allowed the family of Ari Fuld, an American-Israeli murdered by a Palestinian terrorist in Gush Etzion in 2017, and dozens of other U.S. victims of Palestinian terror, to proceed with their lawsuits against both entities.

Any funds provided by the United States to the PA, including the INCLE aid, alleviate the direct onus on the PA to compensate the victims of terror, and in essence, mean that it is the U.S. taxpayers and the U.S. government who will be compensating them and not the PA or Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) which have driven, incentivized and rewarded terrorism.

2. The PA is gradually merging with the PLO – a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.

Every dollar that flows to the PA through the INCLE account effectively frees an equivalent amount in the PA’s own budget. Once those internal funds are liberated, they can be redirected elsewhere – in particular, toward payments that benefit the PLO and its terror-linked programs.

This redirection of funds is possible because PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas chairs both the PA and the PLO, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization since 1987. In February 2022, Abbas formally ordered the merging of their bureaucracies.¹¹

Even before the merger, the PA’s ledgers make the point explicit. They show a permanent budgetary provision to the “PLO Institutions,” which in turn channels salaries to convicted terrorists and the families of those killed while carrying out attacks. While the PA tries its utmost to conceal the terror rewarding payments, whether they are paid directly by the PA or through the PLO, the cash still originates in the PA treasury. In other words, once money enters any PA account it becomes fungible – and can be spent by, or on behalf of, the PLO.

In addition, while the U.S. spending records list somewhat benign purposes for INCLE assistance, the PA’s own accounting provides no traceable link between those purposes and the money actually disbursed.¹² On a cash basis for 2024, the PA recorded NIS 793,622,340 ($239,260,945)¹³ flowing to a broad category labelled “PLO Institutions.”

The ledgers also contain only a single reference to American funding: an entry titled “USA Financing” for NIS 1.23M ($370,820), presented with no project description. Because the documentation stops there, it is impossible to determine whether INCLE dollars are buying radios and uniforms for Palestinian security units or simply merging into the same account pool that finances the PLO.

3. PASF personnel have repeatedly taken part in or directly enabled terror attacks.

Even if INCLE dollars are being used as intended – to “revitalize the civilian security sector and the Palestinian Authority Security Forces (PASF),”¹⁴ – this objective is problematic. While U.S. officials continue to characterize the PASF as a “moderate, professional” partner, the facts suggest otherwise. Since the PASF was established in 1995, its personnel have repeatedly participated in or facilitated terror attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF soldiers.

The PASF were formed under the Oslo Agreement signed in September 1995 “in order to guarantee public order and internal security for the Palestinians of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip…”¹⁵ Over time, this single force grew into a multi-branch apparatus – civil police, preventive security, national security, presidential guard, and others. Each of which is, in principle, meant to counter terrorism and coordinate with Israel on security issues.

After Israel’s 2005 Gaza disengagement, the United States wired $50M in unobligated ESF funds¹⁶ to the PA to reinforce Abbas’s government before the 2006 elections, which Fatah nonetheless lost to Hamas. Soon after, in 2007, the State Department launched the INCLE West Bank/Gaza program, funding training, equipment, and logistics to rebuild and expand the PASF. INCLE funds have supported the PASF ever since, with the stated purpose of advancing conditions to “help achieve a two-state solution.”¹⁷ In practice, however, the PASF has proven itself indistinguishable from other terrorist factions; many of its members conduct or enable the same attacks, simply under a different badge.

The fact that the PASF is involved in terror, rather than trying to prevent it, has been confirmed by PA security officials themselves.

Soon after the October 7, 2023, massacre, Al Jazeera claimed that “the PA makes no contribution to the struggle against the Zionist enemy and even cooperates with it, mostly on security coordination.”

Rejecting the accusation, Colonel Talal Dweikat, the official spokesman for the PASF, responded saying, “We [the PA] have no objective other than achieving liberation, independence and the establishment of the state.”

Speaking on behalf of both “the Fatah Movement and also for the PASF for 30 years,” he proudly added that “the PASF has sacrificed more than 2000 martyrs, [and] hundreds of prisoners, among them those serving life sentences.”¹⁸ In addition, according to senior PLO official Jibril Rajoub, PASF personnel account for 12% of all Palestinian terrorists held in Israeli prisons as “security inmates.”¹⁹

In addition, the Regavim Institute found that many PASF officers hold simultaneous positions in ‘resistance’ movements such as the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the military arm of Fatah, which is directly involved in terrorism.²⁰ Since both the PASF and the Martyrs Brigade are under control of the PA, PLO, and Abbas, it can – and often does – dispatch PASF officers to participate in terror attacks.

Regavim’s report found dozens of instances in which PASF officers attended military funerals for terrorists, disrupted IDF operations in the West Bank, and directly participated in terrorism themselves. In total, 78 PASF members were recorded either executing, attempting, or directly enabling terrorist attacks between 2020 and 2024 – all while receiving millions of dollars of INCLE funding.

A report²¹ published by Palestinian Media Watch that also focused on the participation of PASF member in terror, noted, among scores of other sources, that in March of 2023, Muhammad Hamdan, secretary of Fatah’s Nablus branch, stated: “I think that the entire Palestinian people and the whole world has [recently] seen that more than 1,500 military operations (i.e., terror attacks) against the Israeli occupation were led by the Fatah Movement members and the Security Forces members.”

Another PA official, Director of Palestinian Center for Strategic Studies Muhammad Al-Masri, said in June 2023 that “more than roughly 63-65% of the number of Martyrs in the West Bank, in the daily confrontations, are members of the Fatah Movement, with most being “members of the [PA] Security Forces or their sons… The ones who are being pursued in the streets, arrested, and imprisoned are the Palestinian Security Forces officers.”²²

The reports regarding the involvement of the PASF in terror and the lack of action by PASF members to combat terror are not new. Rather they have been published consistently and demonstrate a clear pattern of the INCLE aid’s failure.²³

Policy Recommendation

Since 2007, the United States has provided nearly $1B in INCLE money to the PA. The funding started, in the aftermath of the Hamas victory in the 2006 PA elections, the move by Abbas to depose the elected Hamas government, and the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip. The goal of the funding was to strengthen the PASF and improve their effectivity in fighting terror in the PA-controlled areas of Judea and Samaria. In practice, however, the funding was used by the PA to combat Hamas activities, as the political rivals of the PA, and not to fight terror. While the funding was used, ostensibly, to train and equip the PASF for its mission to combat terror, in reality, the funding was used to train terrorists who are and were members of the PASF.

While Congress has conditioned the vast majority of U.S. aid to the PA on the abolition of the PA/PLO’s terror incentivizing and terror rewarding “Pay-for-Slay” program, the INCLE funds have continued to flow unabated.

The reality is that the INCLE funding is not achieving its goals. The obstacle is not the source of the funding or its goal, but rather the PA, which incites, incentivizes, and rewards terror with its left hand, and takes money from the United States to ostensibly fight terror with its right hand.

Since it is clear that U.S. aid given to combat terror is actually fueling terror, at the very least, the U.S. administration should reevaluate all future INCLE funding to the PA. To ensure that the PA is prevented from playing its double game and to ensure that U.S. taxpayer money is not facilitating terror, Congress should also consider amending the Taylor Force Act. All INCLE funds should be conditioned on the PA desisting from participating in any form of terror incitement, terror promotion, and terror rewarding, weeding out PASF terrorists. Where Israel has not already done so, members of the PASF who participate in terror or ignore other terror activities should be prosecuted and punished.

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Notes