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The Palestinian Authority increased its payments to terrorists and their families in 2018 by nearly $56 million, Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Avi Dichter (Likud) said overnight Monday, when a bill to discourage the practice passed a first reading.
Dichter pointed out that President Mahmoud Abbas authorized the 2018 PA budget on Sunday, and that there is a PA law that says 7% of each budget must go to paying terrorists, or to their families, if they’re killed in the act.
The increase “means that the PA will employ more terrorists as PA workers,” Dichter said. “Except that the terrorists who work for the PA have a special quality – they are employed both as dead and living terrorists. “Murderers like the ones who killed the Fogel family” – two Palestinians killed five out of eight members of the family in Itamar, including a three-month-old, in 2011 – “are heroes to the PA. This is not a whim. It’s in the PA’s constitution,” Dichter added. The PA paid terrorists and their families more than $347m. in 2017. Terrorists who have been sentenced to three to five years in Israeli prisons receive the average income of a Palestinian, about $580 per month. The families of those who committed more severe crimes and were involved in killing Israelis receive five times that each month for the rest of their lives. The bill that passed a first reading on Monday, proposed by Yesh Atid MK Elazar Stern and Dichter, would require the government to deduct the amount the PA paid to terrorists and their families from the taxes and tariffs Israel collects for the PA. The proposal was inspired by the Taylor Force Act, a US bill named after an American victim of Palestinian terrorism, which would cut all US aid to the PA until the terrorist payments are stopped. Read the full article on the Jerusalem Post
Photo of Taylor Force, student who was killed by a terrorist in 2016.