Palestinian Authority Paid Out $1 Billion In 4 Years For Terrorists’ Salaries

TEL AVIV – The Palestinian Authority has paid out NIS 4 billion ($1.12 billion) over the past four years towards salaries for terrorists and their families, a former intelligence chief said on Monday.

Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, who served as the director general of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, told the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that the longer a Palestinian security prisoner is jailed, “the higher the salary. … Anyone who has sat in prison for more than 30 years gets NIS 12,000 ($3,360) per month.”

“When they’re released, they get a grant and are promised a job at the Palestinian Authority. They get a military rank that’s determined according to the number of years they’ve served in jail,” he added, according to the (Hebrew) NRG website.

Kuperwasser also said the PA’s claim that the funds are social welfare benefits to needy families is simply a lie. Their own budgets, he said, “clearly state that these are salaries and not welfare payments.”

Kuperwasser, today a project director at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs think tank, told the Committee that the funds were channeled indirectly from the PA to recipients “via a non-government ‘payment fund.'”

More here