The Palestinian Authority could pay the families of Hamas terrorists who died while carrying out the savage and deadly attacks on Israeli civilians almost $3 million as “martyr payments,” according to a Palestinian media watchdog.
Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) reports the P.A. also intends to pay $17,590 in salaries to the 50 Hamas prisoners captured by Israeli soldiers, as early as this month.
Under Palestinian Authority law, terrorists who were killed attacking Israel are defined as a “martyr” and their families receive a monthly stipend – a practice that has become known as “pay to slay.”
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The P.A. will pay $2,789,430 this month to the families of 1,500 dead Hamas terrorists as a reward for participating in last week’s murders and atrocities that resulted in the death of 1,400 Israeli citizens, the kidnapping of more than 150 people, and the raping of women and children, the PMW watchgroup reports.
“The Palestinian Authority should be sending a big thank you to the EU countries and Norway, currently the largest funders of the P.A. because the PA could not possibly make these terror payments without them,” wrote Itamar Marcus for PMW. “These donor countries like to pretend that it’s not their money rewarding terrorists, but everyone knows that the P.A. could not reward terrorists without this generous foreign funding.”
He continued, “When payments to teachers, police, and street cleaners are taken care of by international donors, the P.A. has the hundreds of millions available it needs to pay for terror.”
As CBN News reported, the United States indirectly funded these martyr payments by sending foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority.
But in 2018, former president Donald Trump signed the Taylor Force Act, which halts American economic aid to the Palestinian Authority until they stop paying stipends through the “Palestinian Authority Martyr’s Fund.”
The “Taylor Force Act” was named in memory of U.S. Army veteran Taylor Force, who was stabbed to death by an Arab terrorist during a visit to Israel in March 2016. In March of 2018, the Senate approved the Taylor Force Act. The House had passed the bill unanimously the prior December.
The 21-year-old terrorist behind the brutal stabbing of Force was killed by police, but he was praised by the Palestinian Authority government and his family received lifelong financial compensation. About two months after the brutal stabbing, the Force family found out their son’s murderer was financially rewarded, and there were even videos of his heinous act being celebrated in Palestinian areas.
The law cut about a third of U.S. foreign aid payments to the P.A., but more legislation has been pushed to try and end those payments entirely.
As CBN News has reported, the Palestinian Authority paid more than $150 million to the families of terrorists in 2020.
Earlier this year, U.S. Rep Doug Lamborn (R-CO) re-introduced the Taylor Force Martyr Payment Prevention Act. The legislation was originally introduced by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR.) in 2021 and will build upon the original act by seeking to hold financial institutions that process these “pay-to-slay” payments accountable.
“Radical Islamic terrorists shouldn’t be rewarded for killing innocent people, and banks should be held responsible for processing any sort of ‘martyr payments.’ Our bill will build upon the original Taylor Force Act to ensure Palestinian terrorists don’t benefit financially for committing these senseless murders,” Cotton said.