The families of terror victims on Sunday urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to deduct the salaries that the Palestinian Authority pays terrorists and their families from PA tax funds collected by Israel.
Under the 1993 Oslo Accords, a mechanism was set up by which Israel collects taxes – value added tax and customs fees – on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, to the tune of about $100 million a month, and transfers the money to the PA.
The Palestinian Authority uses a considerable portion of these funds to finance the stipends it pays to terrorists and their families.
In 2016, for example, these payments amounted to 1.15 billion shekels ($334 million), or 7% of the PA's total budget for salaries and about 20% of the foreign aid it received.
On Sunday, some 200 bereaved families sent a letter to Netanyahu, urging him to push through legislation that would deduct hundreds of millions of shekels from the tax funds transferred to the Palestinians, essentially biting into the payments made to terrorists and their families.
The so-called "terrorist wages bill," sponsored by Yesh Atid MK Elazar Stern, passed its preliminary Knesset reading in June 2017 and was up for its first reading in November, but the vote was postponed at the request of the Defense Ministry and the National Security Council, which sought to further explore its implications.
Stern said at the time that the bill was "critical for Israel's national security and the war on terror."
The Palestinian Authority's stipend system "not only incites [terrorism], it's an incentive to carry out terrorist attacks. The PA is essentially condoning the murder of Israelis and we have to put an end to it," he said.
"It is almost unbelievable that this theater of the absurd has been going on for decades," the letter sent to Netanyahu on Sunday read.
"On the one hand, the State of Israel sends its sons and daughters to fight terrorism and invests considerable resourced into eradicating it, but on the other hand, the state itself transfers millions to the Palestinian Authority each year, thus allowing it to continue its support for terrorism," the letter said.
Almagor Terror Victims Association head Meir Indor, who is lobbying lawmakers to pass the bill, criticized what he called the government's procrastination in passing the bill.
"Jailed terrorists and their families are getting paid while [Defense Minister Avigdor] Lieberman and [Finance Minister Moshe] Kahlon are just passing the time," he said.
