The Palestinian Authority Is Being Strangled to Death |
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The Palestinian Authority Is Being Strangled to Death
Israel is engineering the collapse of the West Bank’s governing body—a key step on the way to full annexation.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas delivers a speech during the eighth Fatah Conference in the Israeli-occupied West Bank city of Ramallah on May 14, 2026.
Ramallah—“I feel like I am going to work with zombies,” Lutfi said. “People who have had all of their hopes destroyed. They don’t feel like they’re going to get their money.”
Lutfi works for the Palestinian Authority, the body that nominally governs the occupied West Bank. (He asked that his last name be withheld so that he could speak freely about his work.) But it’s unclear how long he will hold on to his job, because the PA’s ability to carry out basic public services, let alone employ people, is collapsing.
The PA is currently facing a deficit of more than 4.5 billion shekels (about $1.9 billion). Amid the financial emergency, Palestinian youth are attending school only three days a week, as schools struggle to pay rising electricity costs and teachers go without salaries. Ministerial offices, even in the relatively insulated city center of Ramallah, are mostly empty. As of late 2025, civil servants were being paid only 60 percent of their salary, in a slow decline since October 7 that reflects the increasingly dire financial straits the PA finds itself in.
To make matters worse, this crisis is not an accident. It is the direct result of Israeli government policy—specifically the policies of far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has made no secret of his desire to eliminate the PA completely. “As far as I’m concerned, let the [Palestinian] Authority collapse. It is an enemy,” Smotrich told Israel’s Channel 14 in June 2025.
“There is a systematic approach by certain members of the coalition to bankrupt the PA and to dissolve it.”Mouin Rabbani, senior fellow at the Middle East Council, explained. “They need to get the PA out of the way in order to exercise complete control over the occupied territories.”
In the aftermath of October 7, Smotrich cited the PA’s failure to condemn the attack as justification for withholding revenue. He has also pointed to the PA’s “Martyrs’ Fund”—a program providing stipends to Palestinian prisoners, which critics call “pay for slay”—as further grounds for the freeze. The fund became the basis of a March 2026 US appeals court ruling finding the PA liable for financing attacks on American citizens. PA President Mahmoud Abbas ended the payments in February 2025 at the Trump administration’s urging.
The distribution of the PA’s “clearance revenues”—which, per the 1994 Paris Protocol, Israel collects on behalf of the PA and is then supposed to distribute every month, to the tune of roughly $188 million—is still on hold. If Israel does........