Abbas's PA gives £30,000 to family of terrorist who killed Israelis, promises new house

The Palestinian Authority this week ordered that the family of a Palestinian terrorist who murdered two Israelis be given £30,000 ($42,000) and a new house given to them.

This is the latest public display of Abbas’s ‘pay to slay’ policy, where Palestinian terrorists are rewarded financially for killing Israelis, including civilians.

The terrorist in question was Muhannad Halabi who stabbed two Israelis, Rabbi Nehemiah Lavi and Aharon Banita, to death on 3 October 2015. In the attack, Halabi also injured Banita’s wife and child who was a toddler at the time.

Halabi was shot dead by Israeli police who responded to the attack.

Halabi’s attack on an innocent family and a rabbi earned him the title “martyr”, and with it comes financial benefits from the Palestinian Authority. This latest payment is likely not the first to the family but is instead in response to Israel’s action of demolishing the family’s home. A government policy is seen to try and disincentivise Palestinian’s from terrorism.

The PA counters these efforts by rewarding terror which is in contravention of UN resolutions and should disqualify the PA from receiving international aid, although most countries appear to ignore this atrocity.

On Sunday, PA District Governor of Ramallah Laila Ghannam met with the family of Muhannad Halabi and gave them the money in Jordanian Dinars, the Kan public broadcaster reported. Ghannam also told the family Abbas had given the order to find them new housing.

According to the Times of Israel, Sunday’s payments are the first high-profile payments to terrorist families since the Biden administration took office, and run counter to claims made by senior Palestinian officials that the so-called pay-for-slay policy would be revisited as part of an effort to rebuild severed ties with Washington.

The PA paid as much as £128 million ($181 million) to terrorists and their families in 2020. A similar amount of money to previous years.

In 2018, PA President Mahmoud Abbas has declared he will never stop paying terrorists.

“We will never stop paying the families of the martyrs and the prisoners, despite the efforts to prevent us from doing so,” he said.

He declared that “even if we only have a penny left, we are going to first put it toward these payments.”