British MPs reconsider funding the PA due to PMW report
British MPs reconsider funding the PA
due to PMW report
Headline: British MPs Call on Government to Reconsider Funding to Palestinian Authority
by Eliezer Sherman
British parliamentarians have called on their government to reconsider providing financial aid to the Palestinian Authority.
The request from Conservative MPs Guto Bebb, James Morris and Andrew Percy on Wednesday came after a Palestinian media watchdog accused the PA of continuing to provide monthly salaries to convicted Palestinian terrorists serving out sentences in Israeli jails.
“The British government must seriously reconsider its provision of aid to the PA’s general budget until it ceases this abhorrent practice of financially rewarding and incentivising terrorism,” said the three in a joint statement.
Last week, Palestinian Media Watch’s Itamar Marcus appeared before members of the British, Dutch and German parliaments to discuss a new report he authored accusing the PA of surreptitiously continuing to pay the salaries, though the PA had closed its prisoner affairs ministry in 2014.
According to Palestinian Media Watch, the PA tricked the British government into believing that it had ceased providing the salaries, though it had simply established a separate body through the Palestinian Liberation Organization to do the job.
Britain’s Department for International Development provides the PA in Ramallah with some £130 million ($199 million) in financial aid each year.
Some of the salaries are more than $3,000 per month, and the total amount paid out to prisoners would amount to more than $150 million in 2015, about 15 percent of the PAs total financial assistance, according to PMW.
“The PA should be strongly condemned for deceiving well-intentioned donor countries into thinking that it had ended this shocking practice,” said the British MPs, calling on the British government to suspend all aid until the matter was settled.
[http://www.algemeiner.com/2015/05/27/british-mps-call-on-government-to-reconsider-funding-to-palestinian-authority/]