Bill to punish Palestinians for pay-for-slay scheme heads to final vote

A bill meant to discourage the Palestinian Authority from continuing to pay terrorists can go to a final vote after the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee authorized it Monday.

The legislation requires the government to deduct the amount the Palestinian Authority pays terrorists from the taxes and tariffs Israel collects for the PA, and is backed by MKs from the coalition and much of the opposition.

The PA paid terrorists over a billion shekels ($347 million) in 2017, and upped the amount to over NIS 1.4 billion ($403 million) in its 2018 budget, according to a Defense Ministry report based on the PA’s budget.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the bill’s passage, and said it will be used to pay damages for fields destroyed by Gazans launching incendiary kites into Israel: “Justice should be done here. Whoever burns fields should know it has a price.”

“This bill fixes a historic injustice,” Yesh Atid MK Elazar Stern, who proposed the bill, said. “This is a bill that will reduce terrorism.”

The committee voted for Stern’s version of the bill, which mandates the deduction with no options for flexibility, as opposed to the Defense Ministry’s draft, which sought to allow the government to decide each year whether to make the deduction or not, and how much, based on diplomatic and other considerations.

The amount deducted will be invested in a fund to pay damages to victims of terror, among other areas.

Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Avi Dichter (Likud) said the panel made history: “Israel will no longer be a pipeline for transferring money to terrorists.”

The average income of a working Palestinian in the West Bank is $580 per month, according to the Israeli Defense Ministry, which is what the PA pays terrorists who are sentenced to three to five years in prison. Terrorists sentenced to 20 years or more in prison – in other words, those who committed more severe crimes, and likely were involved in killing Israelis – receive five times that each month for the rest of their lives.

Terrorists who are Israeli citizens receive a $145 bonus, which, when added to the amount the PA pays for the most severe crimes, comes to over $2,900 a month, more than the average Israeli income of around $2,700. There are also increases in pay for being married and for each child a terrorist has.

If a terrorist is released from prison early or dies in prison, he or his family can continue to receive a monthly salary without a time limit on how long the payments are made.

For example, the PA is expected to pay the terrorist who slaughtered three members of the Salomon family NIS 12,604,000 ($3,478,015) over the course of his lifetime.

Omar al-Abed murdered Yosef Salomon and two of his adult children, Elad and Chaya, and wounded Yosef’s wife, Tovah, when they were celebrating the birth of a grandson in their home in 2017. Elad’s wife hid their children in a nearby room in the house, where they heard the massacre take place. Abed was given four life sentences.

Much of Monday’s committee meeting was dedicated to discussing the flexibility the government sought to keep in the bill.

“I’ve never heard of a situation where you pass a law, and in special circumstances a, the government can decide to cancel it forever,” Dichter said.

Bayit Yehudi MK Shul Muallem Refaeli said that whoever opposes terrorism should oppose funneling money to terrorists: “There are some things you can’t do halfway. There should be no flexibility.”

Maurice Hirsch, former head of the IDF Prosecution for Judea and Samaria and current head of Legal Strategies for Palestinian Media Watch, suggested that, if flexibility is necessary in order for the law it pass, any freezing of the deductions would require approval from the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

In the end, the committee went with no flexibility at all in the draft for a final vote.