Palestinians protest PA prisoner payment reform in sign of implementation after snag |
Hundreds of Palestinians attended protests across the West Bank on Sunday against the Palestinian Authority’s new prisoner payment system. The public anger indicates that Ramallah is moving ahead with the Western-pushed welfare reform, after a series of illicit payments made under the old mechanism led to the firing of the PA finance minister last month.
Demonstrations were held in the cities of Ramallah, Tulkarem, and Nablus, with attendees including the families of prisoners, as well as relatives of individuals killed or wounded in attacks or clashes with Israeli forces.
Speakers at the rallies accused the PA of “criminalizing the Palestinian national struggle” and of trying to frame the stipends as welfare. The protests follow the reform signed by PA President Mahmoud Abbas in February, which requires that future payments be conditioned on financial need, rather than the length of a prisoner’s sentence.
The wife of one prisoner speaking at the Ramallah protest said her family, along with those of at least 1,612 inmates, had not received their monthly stipends in over eight months.
Israel has denied that the PA reform is in place, and its National Security Council dispatched a three-person delegation to Brussels in late November to make the case that payments have continued under the old system, which Jerusalem dubs “pay-to-slay,” accusing the PA of incentivizing attacks on Israelis.
The delegation handed over a “big dossier” of evidence, a European official told The Times of Israel, saying it was not a hard case to make, given Abbas’s firing of then-PA finance minister Omar Bitar for signing off on illicit payments made under the old mechanism.
The European Union is the largest foreign donor to the PA, but continued funds are linked to reforms by Ramallah, including of its prisoner payment system. “We are extremely unhappy after what happened last month. We are serious about the link of the EU money to their reform benchmarks,” the European official said.
A Western diplomat familiar with the matter told The Times of Israel that the evidence Israel presented falls short of a “smoking gun.”
Western countries are aware of the batch of stipends made last month that led to Bitar’s firing, but Israeli claims of a more widespread PA cover-up have yet to be proven, and a US-backed audit of the reform is expected to move ahead next year at Ramallah’s request, the diplomat said.
Recent weeks have seen an uptick in applications for welfare stipends........