The Palestinian Authority will resume civil and security cooperation a Palestinian minister said on Tuesday. Ramallah suspended ties in May over Israel's now-shelved plan to extend sovereignty to parts of Judea and Samaria and the Jordan Valley.
Civil Affairs Minister Hussein al-Sheikh wrote on Twitter that "the relationship with Israel will return to how it was" after PA President Mahmoud Abbas received confirmation that Israel remained committed to past agreements with the Palestinians.
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The 1993 Oslo Accords envisaged the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
Renewed Israeli-Palestinian ties could open the way for the payment of some 3 billion shekels ($890 million) in tax transfers that Israel has been holding for the Authority, whose economy has been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic.
Israel collects the levies on Palestinian imports that go through its ports. Under Israeli law, the government deducts from these funds the salaries the PA pays the families of terrorists killed during or jailed for committing attacks against Israelis, in an effort to discourage Ramallah's highly controversial "pay-for-slay" policy.
The PA has refused to accept the funds saying the deduction was illegal.
In a Zoom video conference organized by the Council on Foreign Relations, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh said the decision to resume cooperation with Israel was based in part on confronting the health crisis.
Between the hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers who live in the West Bank, and the tens of thousands of Palestinian workers who commute to Israel daily for work, coordination was needed to help prevent the virus's spread, Shtayyeh said.
"Our life is so interconnected between us and the Israelis, and there is no way that we can fight viruses by ourselves only," he said.
Palestinian sources said cooperation with Israel would resume immediately. An Israeli official said "we are very close" to renewing coordination, citing exchanges of messages between Israel's defense minister and Palestinian authorities.
In Gaza, however, the ruling terrorist group Hamas condemned the rival West Bank-based Palestinian Authority's decision as a "stab against efforts to achieve a real national partnership."
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