Jerusalem collects 600 million to 700 million shekels ($162 million to $189 million) in tax and tariff revenue on behalf of Ramallah every month under the terms of the Oslo Accords, signed in the 1990s.

By Akiva Van Koningsveld, JNS

Israel has transferred 110 million shekels (approximately $29 million) in frozen Palestinian Authority tax revenues to 52 Palestinians who were arrested and tortured by the P.A. for assisting Israeli security forces in preventing terrorist attacks, Hebrew media reported on Tuesday.

The transfer of the funds marked the conclusion of a legal battle led by the Arbus, Kedem, Tzur law firm, which has represented the Palestinian victims, as well as Israeli terror victims, in Jerusalem District Court proceedings.

“This is a dramatic step by the State of Israel,” attorneys Barak Kedem and Aryeh Arbus told Israel National News, noting that “even today, dozens of Palestinians come to our office who were tortured by Abu Mazen’s P.A., solely because they helped Israel prevent terrorism,” referring to P.A. leader Mahmoud Abbas.

“It is important that everyone out there who helps Israel in various ways knows that, when the time comes, Israel will assist them,” they added.

A spokesman for Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told JNS on Tuesday that every court decision requiring the P.A. to pay damages to terror victims or to Palestinians persecuted for aiding Israel is now executed promptly, with funds deducted from Ramallah’s tax revenues.

Jerusalem collects 600 million to 700 million shekels ($162 million to $189 million) in tax and tariff revenue on behalf of Ramallah every month under the terms of the Oslo Accords, signed in the 1990s.

“For years, the Palestinian Authority encouraged terror without paying a price. No more,” Smotrich’s spokesman said, adding that verdicts totaling billions of shekels have been enforced to date.

The lawsuits were based on a precedent-setting Supreme Court ruling from 2021, which determined that Israeli courts are authorized to hear claims against the P.A., which it said does not enjoy state immunity.

Medical files submitted in the various lawsuits proved P.A. officers beat their victims all over their bodies with rifles, batons and electric cables.

They were denied sleep and access to a toilet, forced to drink soap and had teeth broken. Family members were also threatened.

Judge Miriam Ilany ruled in December that Ramallah “is responsible for the unlawful imprisonment and torture of the cooperators,” adding that the conduct “constitutes a blatant violation of basic human rights.”

“It is hard to believe that the Israeli courts would recognize a defense that cooperation with Israel is an act of treason in favor of the Israeli enemy,” she said.

“In addition, those acts of ‘treason’ were intended to prevent acts of terrorism against Israel and against Israelis, which the P.A. pledged to prevent in the [Oslo Accords] interim agreement.”

Under the terms of the Oslo Accords, which the Jewish state signed with Palestinian terror leader Yasser Arafat in the 1990s, the newly created P.A. was tasked with fighting terrorism in parts of Judea and Samaria.

The P.A. has one of the largest per capita security forces in the world, trained and armed by the United States and other Western nations.

Some countries want the P.A. to assume control of Gaza after the war against Hamas ends, a move that Jerusalem has so far resisted.

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More than 75% of Dutch Jews perished in the Holocaust.

By JNS

“War in Court,” a Dutch project, released nearly half a million names of suspected wartime Nazi collaborators on Thursday after a law restricting public access to the archive expired on New Year’s Day.

The 32-million-page archive covers 425,000 mostly Dutch people investigated for collaboration with occupying German forces during World War II, Reuters reported.

Only one-fifth of those listed ever appeared before a court. Most cases involved “lesser offenses such as being a member of the Nationalist Socialist movement,” the news outlet said.

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) protects personal data, but it doesn’t apply to dead people, which includes most of those listed in the archive.

At first, scanned files were to be available starting Thursday, with dossiers of suspects including victims and witnesses.

But after a warning from the Dutch Data Protection Authority, a decision was made to publish only names and postpone the more detailed data release.

According to Yad Vashem’s website, 140,000 Jews lived in the Netherlands when Germany invaded in May 1940.

In summer 1942, the deportation to the death camps began. Transports left the transit camps of Westerbork and Vught, mostly for Auschwitz and Sobibor.

A total of 107,000 Jews had been deported to the extermination camps by September 1944. Only 5,200 of them returned after the war, with more than 75% of Dutch Jews perishing in the Holocaust.

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