PA officials: Agreeing to Israel's deduction of money we pay prisoners, will be admitting they are “terrorists”

Director of PLO Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs Qadri Abu Bakr: "We have been paying salaries to [the prisoners] for more than 53 years…"

PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas: "The issue of the families of the Martyrs and the prisoners is at the top of our list of priorities, and any amount [of money] we have will be earmarked for them…"

Qadri Abu Bakr: "These Martyrs and prisoners are the best of our people…
If we agree to the deducting of this money (i.e., sum equivalent to PA terror salaries), it means that we agree that they are truly a group of terrorists – murderers, as Israel calls them. We would be defining their struggle as a crime, and defining as a crime our people’s struggles for more than 50 years of struggle…"

PA Prime Minister Muhammad Shtayyeh: "If we agree, there will be a political consequence for our children in the prisons, in the sense that we agree that they committed an act of terror, and we will not agree to this…
If we agree to this, the PA will be subject to lawsuits in the Israeli, international, and American courts for funding terror."

Israel's Anti "Pay-for-Slay" Law - 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 by the Israeli Parliament 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] In accordance with the law, as of September 2021 Israel’s Security Cabinet had ordered the freeze of 1.857 billion shekels ($580.15 million) - the sum equivalent to the PA payments to terrorists in 2018, 2019, and 2020.