PA has stopped paying over 1,600 prisoners as part of reform — sources

The Palestinian Authority has stopped paying stipends to at least 1,612 Palestinian security prisoners in Israeli jails, two Palestinian sources told The Times of Israel on Sunday, as Ramallah appeared to move forward with a reform of its controversial welfare system.

In February, PA President Mahmoud Abbas signed a decree cancelling legislation that established the old system, which included payments to the families of slain terrorists and the families of security prisoners based on the length of their sentence. The decree also established a new non-governmental body that was tasked with providing welfare payments strictly based on economic need.

Palestinians — including the families of prisoners and slain attackers — will be able to apply for welfare stipends and bureaucrats will adjudicate whether each applicant will receive payments and how much based on a series of economic-related criteria, Palestinian and US officials have told The Times of Israel.

The transition to the new system has taken time, but last month, senior Palestinian official Hussein al-Sheikh — who has since been formally appointed Abbas’s deputy — penned a letter to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio inviting the Trump administration to send a delegation to Ramallah from June 1 onward in order to certify that the PA has implemented the reform and is in compliance with US legislation that bars American aid that directly benefits the PA so long its previous prisoner payment system remained in place.

Palestinian sources told The Times of Israel in March and April that families of prisoners and slain attackers were still receiving stipends based on the old system, as the new system was not in place. But that is no longer the case for at least 1,612 prisoners, who did not receive any stipend for the month of May, the two sources said.

The sources did not know what that meant for the thousands of other prisoners and could not elaborate further on the figure.