Exclusive: Abbas sacks finance minister for illicit payments to prisoners, sources reveal to ToI

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has ousted his finance minister for allowing direct payments to Palestinian security prisoners through an old mechanism that awards them based on the length of their sentence, a Palestinian official and a second source familiar with the matter tell The Times of Israel.

Abbas’s office announced earlier Monday that PA Minister of Planning and International Cooperation Estephan Salameh had replaced Omar Bitar as finance minister through the PA’s official Wafa news outlet but did not provide a reason for the decision.

The sources say Bitar’s dismissal follows 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.

The reform had long been demanded by the US, Israel and many of the PA’s backers in the Arab world and Europe, who accused Ramallah of incentivizing attacks on Israelis, dubbing the old policy “pay-to-slay.”

Abbas signed a decree in February scrapping the old system and publicly reiterated that it was no longer in place in remarks to the UN General Assembly in September.

While the vast majority of payments under the old system had indeed ceased as the new system came into place, a small minority of prisoner families managed to receive stipends through the old payment mechanism, the two sources tell The Times of Israel.