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PLO Prisoners’ Affairs director claims Israel wants to "criminalize the Palestinian people’s struggle... to present them as terrorists and to prevent their families from [receiving] salaries that will support them"

Headline: “The Hebrew media is falsifying the facts in order to criminalize the Palestinian struggle”
     “Once again, in a scenario that repeats itself, the occupation government is trying to extort the Palestinians through the use of the returns from the tax money, which to them constitute a large part of the public income…
Director of [PLO] Commission of Prisoners and Released Prisoners’ Affairs Qadri Abu Bakr emphasized in a press statement that the commission will not concede to the [Israeli] law, and said: ‘As the Palestinian leadership has emphasized, the salaries (rawatib) will not be harmed.’ He added: ‘They want to criminalize the Palestinian people’s struggle before the world, to present them as terrorists and to prevent their families from [receiving] salaries that will support them, while the Israeli criminals receive three salaries (sic., Israeli criminals receive no money).”

Law to deduct terrorist salaries from PA tax money - Israeli law stating that the PA payments to terrorists and the families of dead terrorists is a financial incentive to terror. The law instructs the state to deduct and freeze the amount of money the PA pays in salaries to imprisoned terrorists and families of "Martyrs" from the tax money Israel collects for the PA. Should the PA stop these payments for a full year, the Israeli government would have the option of giving all or part of the frozen money to the PA. The law was enacted on July 2, 2018.
During the parliamentary vote, the law's sponsor Avi Dichter said: “The Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee received much help in its deliberations... from Palestinian Media Watch who provided us with authentic data that enabled productive and professional deliberations, nuances that are very difficult to achieve without precise data.” [Israeli Parliament website, July 2, 2018]

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