Seeking funds abroad, Abbas ally touts prisoner payment reform that’s ‘unpopular’ at home
Tapped to head welfare fund replacing ‘pay-to-slay,’ Ahmad Majdalani says it’ll be strictly need-based, and should suffice for US and Israel to scrap ‘unjust’ sanctions on Ramallah
Jacob Magid is The Times of Israel's US bureau chief
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Last month, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas signed a decree ending Ramallah’s controversial prisoner payment system, which had been a lightning rod for criticism from Israel and the international community.
The decree ended a decades-long policy of providing welfare payments to Palestinians in Israeli prisoners — in addition to the families of slain and wounded attackers — based on the length of their sentence.
All welfare stipends — for prisoners and others — have been moved out of the PA to a nongovernmental body called the Palestinian National Economic Empowerment Fund, which will be headed by former PA welfare minister Ahmad Majdalani, a longtime Abbas confidant.
In a rare interview with a foreign media outlet — particularly an Israeli one — Majdalani cautiously explained what he acknowledged was a domestically unpopular reform, urging the international community to support it in both word and deed.
“It is not enough to welcome this reform. You also need to support it financially,” Majdalani told The Times of Israel in his Ramallah office last week, recalling the message he imparted to international diplomats during a private briefing he held days earlier to explain the reform.
He argued that countries can do this by writing a check or by leaning on the US and Israel to roll back their “unjust” sanctions against the PA over what proponents of those penalties brand as Ramallah’s “pay-to-slay” policy.
Without financial support, the PA will find itself in an even more precarious position, given how unpopular the reform is among Palestinians.
“Frankly, it is not easy to take this decision, because the issue of prisoners and martyrs is a very sensitive one for the Palestinian public,” Majdalani acknowledged.
The political timing isn’t exactly ideal for Ramallah, given that the reform came in the midst of the Gaza ceasefire deal, through which Hamas secured the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners. The terror group has sought to capitalize on the opportunity, issuing statements juxtaposing its efforts on behalf of the prisoners with the PA’s “abandonment” of them.
Is it real?
For years, the PA pushed back on calls to end the prisoner payments, arguing that the policy was necessary in light of what it views as Israel’s callous military rule, under which thousands of Palestinians are detained without due process.
Notably, public resistance to the prisoner payment reform has not translated into major street protests as some analysts had predicted. Those might come, however, once the newly calculated stipends are divvied out. All recipients must reapply first and the review process by Majdalani’s office is expected to take several months, he said.
Regardless, Majdalani — who also serves as a faction leader in the high-level Palestine Liberation Organization executive committee — made a point of clarifying that the PA was not “blackmailing the international community.”
“We are not imposing conditions where we’re only doing this if they pay. We’re doing this because it’s our duty,” he said.
The sensitivity of the issue — and Abbas’s attempt to balance domestic blowback with international support — was on full display late last month when the PA leader addressed a session of the Fatah’s Revolutionary Council.
#ICYMI: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas Reaffirms “Pay-to-Slay” Policy: If We Have Only a Single Penny Left, It Will Go to the Prisoners and the Martyrs – I Will Not Allow Any Reduction in Our Commitments to Them pic.twitter.com/T7I9pLsue1
— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) March 1, 2025
“I once said… that if we have one penny left, it’ll be for the prisoners and martyrs,” Abbas said in a clip from a lengthy speech that was quickly picked up by critics, who argued it proved the PA wasn’t serious about the reform.
The prisoners “should receive [exactly] what they got in the past… I won’t allow [anyone] to take a penny away from them,” the PA leader added.
Majdalani said Abbas was only referring to the previous payment scheme and that later in the speech he referred to the new system, which only offers payments based on financial need. He said this was left out of the clips shared by skeptics of the PA reform.
Nearly the same argument was made in a separate interview that The Times of Israel conducted hours earlier with another top Abbas aide, Mahmoud Habbash.
But the full video of Abbas’s speech was taken down from the PA’s website, indicating that perhaps the PA president wasn’t as clear-cut as his advisers made him out to be.
Still, the reform was lambasted by the since-ousted head of the PA’s prisoner support club, indicating that those potentially most impacted by the reform are taking it seriously, as is Ramallah.
Moving forward, despite Trump plan
Successive American administrations had worked to coax the PA to reverse the prisoner payments program, and former US president Joe Biden’s envoy to the Palestinians Hady Amr quietly made significant progress in that endeavor.
Ultimately, however, Ramallah refrained from announcing the reform during the tenure of Biden, who failed to deliver on a number of campaign promises made to the Palestinians.
Instead, Abbas waited to sign the decree until after US President Donald Trump returned to office, as a demonstration of goodwill.
The PA didn’t even hold off on the step after Trump announced his proposal for the US to take over Gaza and permanently “clean it out” of Palestinians.
Less than a week later, Abbas signed the decree, catching many in the international community off guard, while others barely noticed the announcement amid the grueling Israeli-Palestinian conflict news cycle of the last year.
It took two days for the Trump administration to respond, but the State Department issued a statement welcoming the reform as “a positive step and a big win” for the US president, while adding that it would be monitoring its implementation.
Getting the US and Israel on board
That monitoring is required under US legislation that the PA reform is trying to reverse — a 2018 law called the Taylor Force Act, which bars almost all aid that directly benefits the PA so long as the payment policy based on prison sentences remains in place.
With the decree now signed by Abbas to end the policy, the State Department will take the next several months to determine how it is being implemented.
The PA designed much of the reform specifically in order to come into compliance with the Taylor Force Act and is under the impression that the US will recognize it as such, a diplomatic source in Ramallah told The Times of Israel.
Majdalani said that the reform was built in coordination with US officials and lawmakers, including Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham and Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who both expressed their backing for the PA plan.
A congressional aide to Van Hollen said the progressive lawmaker had pressed the PA to conduct the reform on multiple occasions in order for Ramallah to come into compliance with US law.
A spokesperson for Graham did not respond to a request for comment, but a former US official said the Republican senator expressed his support for the reform when he was briefed on it last year.
Ramallah is also hoping that the reform will lead to the reversal of Knesset legislation passed shortly after Taylor Force, which deducts the sum of the payments the PA makes to the families of prisoners and slain and wounded Palestinians from the tax revenues that Jerusalem transfers each month to Ramallah.
Majdalani indicated that there has been less contact with Israel regarding this issue, though, as ties are particularly poor with the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who regularly likens the PA to Hamas.
Israel has been withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenues that Jerusalem collects on Ramallah’s behalf, in what Majdalani branded as “theft.”
The withheld cash has further exacerbated an already dire situation for the Palestinian economy, which has long suffered amid the PA’s power imbalance with and reliance on Israel. The PA has been under particular duress since Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, after which Israel rescinded permits for the vast majority of the 150,000 Palestinians who were working in Israel and its settlements, citing security concerns.
Do you own a washing machine?
Offering some details regarding the reform, Majdalani said all welfare payments will be distributed under one system moving forward. The amounts will be calculated based on very specific financial criteria that will be adjudicated by social workers, who will go house to house to probe the exact conditions of each applicant.
Anyone can apply, but only households earning particularly low wages will be eligible. Those making the minimum wage ($518) will be eligible for higher payments, and those making below the national poverty line ($770) will receive slightly less.
Majdalani declined to give specific amounts for how much a beneficiary household might typically receive, insisting that each case will differ based on the various criteria, which gets into granular details, such as whether or not a family owns a washing machine.
He avoided saying specifically that the families of prisoners and slain attackers will also be able to apply, but he did stress that the program will be open to every Palestinian household. Accordingly, many prisoners are likely to remain eligible to receive funds from the PA, given the high Palestinian poverty rate.
But now, how much those prisoners receive will depend on how poor they are and whether the PA secures the funds to sustain the program.
The Times of Israel Community.