Postal service replaces outlawed bank accounts as vehicle for terror funding

“One of the most important justifications for the postal bank’s existence is the provision of financial services to the prisoners.” 

By World Israel News Staff

No longer able to pay terrorists by transferring funds to their bank accounts, the Palestinian Authority has come up with a new system to fund the murder and maiming of innocent Israelis.

In April 2020, Palestinian Media Watch informed the banks operating in the Palestinian Authority that provisions of Israel’s 2016 Anti-Terror Law had been incorporated into the law in Judea and Samaria.

Therefore, if the banks continued to hold the bank accounts of terrorists receiving funding from the PA, “they would potentially expose themselves to both civil and criminal liability,” Maurice Hirsch, Adv., head of PMW’s legal department explains in an article published Sunday on the watchdog’s site.

The banks closed the accounts of 35,000 terrorists but the PA found a new way to fund terrorists via its postal service. Through this system, the PA pays 52 million shekels (appr. $16 million) every month to terrorists imprisoned in Israel and released prisoners as well as an unknown number of wounded terrorists and families of dead terrorists (“martyrs”).

Indeed, according to an article published August 11, 2022, in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, the official PA daily, and translated by PMW, “one of the most important justifications for the postal bank’s existence is the provision of financial services to the prisoners, the wounded, and the families of the Martyrs, as the [PA] government is paying salaries to more than 11,000 prisoners and released prisoners in accordance with the Law of Prisoners and Released Prisoners No. 19 of 2004 – a sum equal to 52 million [Israeli] shekels [a month].”

The Palestinian Authority Martyrs Fund originated in 1964, when Abbas’s ruling Fatah party, which includes the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades terrorist wing, created the vehicle to support widows and orphans of Palestinian “liberators.”

Responding to sanctions against the Authority by Israel and by the Trump administration in 2018, PA President Mahmoud Abbas and other senior Palestinian officials have vowed to continue their pay-for-slay policy, calling it their “right.”