Skip to content

Does the Palestinian Authority pay people to commit terrorism?

Short answer: YES. The Palestinian Authority runs a documented stipend system, and the payments scale with the length of the prison sentence. And the 2025 claim to have abolished it is, on the evidence, a relabeling, not a real ending.

The mechanism [VERIFIED]

The Palestinian Authority runs two payment streams. One pays stipends to Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. The other pays the families of Palestinians killed in connection with anti-Israel violence. The payment scales with the length of the sentence: a longer sentence means a larger stipend. Since 2014, a PLO body called the Prisoners Commission has run the payments, not a PA ministry. This lets the PA say the money is not a "PA budget" line. The amounts have run roughly $150M–$350M per year, about 7% of the PA budget at its 2016–18 peak [ESTIMATE with range; recent figures are Israeli-government-sourced and contested].

The 2025 question, tested [DISPUTED — both printed]

In February 2025, President Abbas signed a decree that claimed to abolish the fund. It would be replaced with need-based welfare run through the Ministry of Social Development. Many read the move as aimed at keeping US and EU funding. But the US State Department and multiple watchdogs document that payments continued. The money was routed through the PLO commission, through other payrolls, and through pension systems. Some of it moved through Jordan and Lebanon, beyond the reach of Western auditors. Whether the reform is genuine is disputed. The honest verdict is a documented relabeling of a still-flowing program. It is not a clean end, and it is not a proven full continuation.

Both framings, at full strength

  • The PA's justification: Abbas frames the payments as social responsibility. He says they support families that lost a breadwinner to killing or imprisonment. He calls this a welfare duty, not a bounty. He also notes that many recipients are families of the dead, or of administrative detainees who were never convicted of violence. In his own words: "if we are left with one penny, we will spend it on the families of the prisoners and martyrs" [VERIFIED quote]
  • The critique: the stipend scales with sentence length, which tracks the severity of the act. Critics argue this makes the system work like a graduated reward schedule. The family-welfare frame cannot explain why a life sentence pays more than a short one. A welfare system does not pay more for a deadlier crime [DOCUMENTED]

The context [VERIFIED]

The US Taylor Force Act (2018) is named for a US Army veteran murdered in Jaffa in 2016. It suspends US economic aid that directly benefits the PA until the PA ends the payments. Israel does something separate: it deducts the estimated payment total from the tax revenue it collects on the PA's behalf (Document 22).

The dispatch test

The payments and their sentence-scaling structure are not in dispute. The PA confirms the payments exist and defends them. The only dispute is over what the February 2025 decree changed. The documented answer is: the routing, not the substance. Ask anyone who says "the PA reformed it" to name what the State Department and watchdogs found afterward. The full financing picture, in every direction, is in Document 38.

Go deeper: Terrorism Financing & Money Laundering · Money & Influence in Washington · The UN & Israel