After ToI revelation of PA’s ongoing prisoner payments, Sa’ar says Abbas trying ‘to fool world’

Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar says Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas’s decision to fire his finance minister over illicit payments to security prisoners is insufficient, claiming that Ramallah is trying to “fool the world.”

“Dismissing the Palestinian Authority’s finance minister will not absolve the dismisser, Mahmoud Abbas, and the PA, of their complicity in pay-for-slay and responsibility for the ongoing payments to terrorists and their families,” Sa’ar writes on X, following a revelation by The Times of Israel that PA Finance Minister Omar Bitar signed off on payments to some prisoners based on the length of their sentences, even though Abbas had ordered the cessation of that practice.

Abbas’s office announced earlier that PA Minister of Planning and International Cooperation Estephan Salameh had replaced Omar Bitar as finance minister, without providing a reason for the move.

A Palestinian official and a second source familiar with the matter said Bitar’s dismissal followed an internal investigation revealing that he authorized payments to some Palestinian security prisoners outside the new system that the PA established earlier this year, which conditioned those welfare stipends strictly on financial need, rather than the length of one’s sentence.