Does the Palestinian Authority pay people to commit terrorism?

Short answer: YES — through a documented, sentence-scaled stipend system — and the 2025 claim to have abolished it is, on the evidence, a relabeling, not an ending.

The mechanism [VERIFIED]

The Palestinian Authority operates two payment streams: stipends to Palestinians imprisoned in Israel, and payments to families of Palestinians killed in connection with anti-Israel violence. The payment scales with the length of the sentence — a longer sentence means a larger stipend. Since 2014 the payments have been administered through the PLO's Prisoners Commission rather than a PA ministry, which lets the PA claim they are not a "PA budget" line. Amounts have run roughly $150M–$350M per year, about 7% of the PA budget at its 2016–18 peak [ESTIMATE with range; recent figures are Israeli-government-sourced and contested].

The 2025 question, tested [DISPUTED — both printed]

In February 2025 President Abbas signed a decree claiming to abolish the fund and replace it with need-based welfare through the Ministry of Social Development — a gesture widely read as aimed at US and EU funding. But the US State Department and multiple watchdogs document that payments continued — routed through the PLO commission, alternate payrolls, and pension frameworks, some via Jordan and Lebanon beyond Western auditors. The reform's genuineness is disputed; the honest verdict is documented relabeling of a still-flowing program, not a clean end and not a proven full continuation.

Both framings, at full strength

• The PA's justification: Abbas frames the payments as social responsibility to families that lost a breadwinner to killing or imprisonment — a welfare obligation, not a bounty — and notes many recipients are families of the dead and of administrative detainees never convicted of violence. In his own words: "if we are left with one penny, we will spend it on the families of the prisoners and martyrs" [VERIFIED quote]
• The critique: because the stipend scales with sentence length — with the severity of the act — critics argue the structure functions as a graduated reward schedule. The family-welfare frame cannot explain why a life sentence pays more than a short one; a welfare system does not pay more for a deadlier crime [DOCUMENTED]

The context [VERIFIED]

The US Taylor Force Act (2018, named for a US Army veteran murdered in Jaffa in 2016) suspends US economic aid that directly benefits the PA until it ends the payments. Israel separately deducts the estimated payment total from the tax revenues it collects on the PA's behalf (Document 22).

The dispatch test

The fact of the payments and their sentence-scaling structure is not in dispute — the PA confirms the payments exist and defends them. What is disputed is only what the February 2025 decree changed, and the documented answer is: the routing, not the substance. Ask anyone who says "the PA reformed it" to name what the State Department and watchdogs found afterward. The full financing picture — in every direction — is in Document 38.

Go deeper: Terrorism Financing & Money Laundering · Money & Influence in Washington · The UN & Israel