Is the PA lying to European governments to receive funding?

European and US money donated to the PA's general budget is paying salaries not only to all Palestinian terrorists in Israeli prisons but also to 4,000 former security and terrorist prisoners

Itamar Marcus/Nan Jacques Zilberdik..
Palestinian Media Watch..
14 February '13..

Palestinian Media Watch has seen statements by both the British and Norwegian governments defending their payments to the Palestinian Authority's general budget for salaries. These statements came in response to two PMW reports documenting that thousands of imprisoned terrorists are among the recipients of PA salaries. In their statements, both the British and Norwegian governments say that the PA has informed them that the PA does not pay "salaries" to terrorists in Israeli prisons, but social "assistance" payments to the prisoners' families. Minister of State Alan Duncan on behalf of Britain's Department for International Development (DfID) said: "The second [PA] payment scheme [to prisoners] is intended to assist families in need of assistance." Both governments have written that this information was received from the PA. (See statements below.)

PMW has repeatedly rejected this claim and documented that the payments are indeed salaries not correlated to need but given as a reward for the prisoners' terror acts, which the PA sees as actions worthy of "esteem." (See below.) It would violate the letter or spirit of the Western donor countries' laws and certainly the intent of all Western donors, to have their contributions to the PA go to terrorists' salaries.

1. PA Minister's statement rejects as "rumor" the information the PA supplied to the Europeans


The PA has now released a statement through its official news service, WAFA, explicitly contradicting the information that it supplied to the Europeans, while corroborating PMW's documentation. The PA Minister of Prisoners' Affairs, Issa Karake, announced that the categorization of the prisoners' "salaries" as social "assistance" was an incorrect "rumor":

"[Minister of Prisoners' Affairs Issa] Karake denies rumors about changing salaries (Arabic: rawatib) into social assistance (Arabic: i'anat ijtima'iya)... He noted that the government headed by Salam Fayyad considers the prisoners' cause central, and has authorized regulations to support and protect them out of esteem for their sacrifice and struggle."
[WAFA (the official Palestinian Authority news agency), Dec. 27, 2012]

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