JERUSALEM—Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas fired his prisoners’ affairs commissioner this week, seemingly demonstrating new seriousness about reforming the system of payments for terrorists that the commissioner oversaw and vocally defended.
But Abbas simultaneously replaced the former commissioner, Qadura Fares, with another convicted terrorist and leading proponent of the payments, Raed Abu al-Humus. The incoming boss quickly confirmed his support for killing Israelis.
Just hours after his appointment, the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs published a photograph of Abu al-Humus smiling alongside two arch-terrorists, Ahmed Barghouti and Mohammed Aradeh, whom Israel recently released to Cairo as part of a hostage-ceasefire deal with Hamas. Barghouti, 48, was sentenced to 13 life sentences for orchestrating a series of terrorist attacks that killed 12 Israelis and wounded dozens, and Aradeh, 42, was given life in prison for attempted murder and other crimes.
The photo is among a number of early signs that Abbas will once again disappoint international donors who expect him to end “pay for slay,” as critics call the Palestinian Authority’s longstanding payments to security prisoners and the families of terrorists killed while carrying out attacks against Israelis.
“The problem is the Palestinian Authority believes that terrorists are the most honored people, and they still believe they’re the most honored people,” Itamar Marcus, the director of Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli watchdog group that has closely tracked the terrorism payments for years, told the Washington Free Beacon. “They are not saying they’ve decided it’s wrong to reward terrorists. They are saying that this [reform] is something we were forced to do because we’re in a financial crisis. That’s why there’s no meaning to this, and that’s why there’s no reason for any optimism.”
In a vaguely worded presidential decree last week, Abbas revoked the Palestinian Authority’s “financial allowances to the families of prisoners, martyrs, and the wounded” and made the recipients “subject to the same standards applied without discrimination to all families benefiting from protection and social welfare programs, in accordance with the standards of comprehensiveness and justice.” Abbas also transferred oversight of the terrorism payments from the prisoners’ affairs commission to the Palestinian National Economic Empowerment Institution, a body controlled by his office.
International media hailed the move as the “end” of the terrorism payments and a “serious reform.” European Commission officials called the “awaited decree law” a “significant political development” that “signals the Palestinian Authority’s commitment to implement far-reaching reforms that will improve its efficiency and stabilise its fiscal situation.”
“A reformed and revitalised Palestinian Authority remains at the core of efforts towards a two-state solution,” the officials added in a statement this week. “Therefore the [European Union] stands firm in its support to the Palestinian Authority and calls on international partners to provide the Palestinian Authority with political and financial support to empower the Palestinian government to continue to pursue its ambitious reform agenda.”
A State Department spokesman said last week that Abbas’s decree “appears to be a positive step and a big win for the Trump Administration.” But earlier this week, the Trump administration froze funding for the Palestinian Authority Security Forces.
Meanwhile, Palestinian officials have reassured the Arab public that the terrorism payments will continue. Abbas affirmed his commitment to the payments at a meeting of his Fatah political party’s parliamentary body on Friday, using the same uncompromising language that he and other Palestinian leaders have often used in the past.
“We repeat and emphasize that we are proud of the sacrifice of the martyrs,” Abbas said in televised remarks. “Even if we only have one cent left, it will go to the prisoners and martyrs. They must receive everything as in the past, for they are more precious than all of us put together.”
Qatar’s Al-Sharq newspaper quoted unnamed senior Palestinian officials last Wednesday as saying the terrorism payments would continue “without any reduction.” The officials reportedly explained that Abbas’s decree was a response to growing U.S., European, and Israeli financial pressure that has left the Palestinian Authority $3 billion in debt to local banks and unable to borrow more.
Munir al-Jaghoub, a senior Fatah official, told the UAE’s Al-Mashhad TV a day earlier that Abbas “did not stop anyone’s salaries.” According to al-Jaghoub, the president simply “issued a law to transfer these salaries to another entity that is not subject to restrictions” by the European Union.
Israeli foreign minister Gideon Saar told international media on Tuesday that the Palestinian Authority has continued “with its usual deception and its pay-for-slay strategy.”
“Based on their statements and intelligence we have, payments to families of terrorists proceed this week as always,” Saar said. “The [authority] continues to finance and encourage terrorism.”
Saar’s remarks echoed a reported assessment by senior Israeli security officials at a security cabinet meeting on Tuesday. According to Israeli media, the officials described Abbas’s purported reform “a deception, a cosmetic move, and a facelift designed to gain legitimacy with the U.S. administration.”
Abbas’s office, the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, and the National Economic Empowerment Institution did not respond to requests for comment.
In 2018, the last year the Palestinian Authority published a budget, the terrorism payments totaled $340 million, or 7 percent of planned spending.
Abbas’s Palestinian Authority has long used diplomatic and accounting maneuvers to evade international pressure to end the terrorism payments. In 2020, Abbas backed out of negotiations with the Biden administration to reform the system, and in 2014, he attempted to hide the payments by temporarily shifting their distribution to the PLO’s Commission for Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs.
In the early 2000s, Israel brought in three top international accounting firms as part of an effort to block the PLO’s diversion of funding for the second intifada, a yearslong wave of Palestinian terrorism. But according to Yossi Kuperwasser, then the head of Israeli military intelligence’s research division, the accountants found the Palestinians’ bookkeeping impenetrable.
“It took exactly three months for these elite companies to declare they were leaving because they couldn’t do the job,” Kuperwasser, who went on to become the director general of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs and now heads the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security think tank, recalled to the Free Beacon. “All through these games and tweaks, the Palestinians kept paying the salaries to terrorists. So I doubt we are going to see a change this time.”
If the Palestinian Authority were to end or significantly reduce the payments, prisoners and their families would undoubtedly lead mass protests that could threaten the authority’s survival, Kuperwasser, Marcus and other Israeli experts on the Palestinian Authority agreed.
The experts said that many of the Palestinian Authority officials in charge of the terrorism payments have long been convicted terrorists who served time in Israeli prisons, and that is unlikely to change. Marcus pointed to Abu al-Humus as an example. While Abu al-Humus’s prisoners’ affairs committee no longer formally oversees the payments, he is listed online as a board member of the body that does, the National Economic Empowerment Institution.
“This is the Palestinian Authority,” Marcus said. “And the Palestinian Authority is a terror-supporting entity.”
In 2022, Abu al-Humus, then the head of international relations at the prisoners’ affairs commission, effusively praised Nasser Abu Hamid, a late founder of Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terrorist group who died of cancer in Israeli prison while serving seven life sentences for murdering Israelis. Abu al-Humus, who spent 10 years in prison alongside Abu Hamid for his own involvement in terrorism, remembered his late comrade as a “masked lion” and an “inspiration” to the “Palestinian youth.”
“He was not interested in political work but rather focused greatly on the struggle [against Israel],” Abu al-Humus told the Palestinian Wattan News Agency. “He worked with his colleagues in the resistance to end [Israel] and sweep it from the Palestinian land.”
This article was originally published at freebeacon.com
Author
