TEL AVIV – New legislation that proposes deducting the amount paid by the Palestinian Authority to terrorists and their families from monies owed by Israel in taxes will be submitted in the Knesset, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said on Monday.
“The PA encourages and incentivizes terrorism,” Liberman said, according to the Jerusalem Post.
“The minute the amount of the payments that the PA gives is in accordance with the severity of the crime, meaning whoever murdered gets much more money than those who just threw Molotov cocktails or rocks or only injured someone, that is direct encouragement of terror. We must put a stop to it,” Liberman added.
The PA has paid out NIS 4 billion ($1.12 billion) over the past four years towards terrorist salaries, as per PA law. According to Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, who served as the director general of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, 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.”
The Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee will hold a session to discuss the bill Tuesday prior to the Defense Ministry’s submission based on an initial draft drawn up by Yesh Atid MK Elazar Stern in March.
Stern said he was “glad to hear Defense Minister Liberman adopting my bill, which is supported by all the security bodies in the State of Israel,” the report said.
“The time has come for the State of Israel to put an end to the PA’s encouragement of terrorism,” he added. “I hope this bill will be promoted quickly and will be brought to a vote in the Knesset in the coming days.”
The legislation is based on the Taylor Force Act, American legislation that would cut U.S. funding to the Palestinian Authority so long as it continues to provide financial support to the families of perpetrators of attacks against Israelis and Israeli-Americans.
The bill is named after former U.S. Army veteran and Vanderbilt University graduate student Taylor Force, who was killed in a stabbing attack while he toured Tel Aviv with his school in March 2016.
In August, Breitbart Jerusalem reported that PA President Mahmoud Abbas reportedly told President Donald Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner that he wouldn’t stop payments to convicted terrorists “until his dying day.”
After his meeting with Kushner, Abbas issued a statement on Facebook in which he vowed again: “I will never stop [paying] the allowances to the families of the prisoners and released prisoners, even if this costs me my position and my presidency.”
“I will pay them until my dying day,” he added.
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