From the Liveblog of
Tuesday, February 18, 2025
Abbas fires top official who pushed back on decree ending ‘pay-to-slay’ system
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has fired an official who criticized his decision to end a system that paid stipends to the families of prisoners, including those convicted of deadly terror attacks against Israelis.
Abbas has announced the replacement of Qadura Fares as head of a prisoner affairs body, without providing an explanation.
Last week, Abbas put an end to what was known as the “martyrs’ fund,” acquiescing to longstanding demands by the United States and Israel. Many Palestinians viewed the payments as compensation for people harmed in the course of their struggle against Israel.
The United States and Israel had long criticized the practice, saying it incentivized violence.
Abbas is deeply unpopular among Palestinians, many of whom view his Palestinian Authority as corrupt and autocratic.
The Hamas terror group, which drove Abbas’s forces from Gaza in 2007, criticized Fares’s firing, saying it reflects the “oppression and exclusion” practiced by the authority and its “submission to Zionist and American dictates.”
Last week, Fares gave a press conference urging the president to immediately withdraw his decree ending the conditioning of welfare payments to Palestinian security prisoners on the length of their sentences in Israeli jails.
While the government will likely continue to provide stipends to many families of prisoners and slain terrorists, it will do so based only on financial need.
Fares criticized Abbas’s decision to transfer the database of information on the families of prisoners and slain attackers from the Social Welfare Ministry to a new independent body called the Palestinian National Foundation for Economic Empowerment.
The Abbas decree went into effect today, and will see Raed Abu al-Humus take Fares’s place as minister.
