A lawsuit on behalf of American victims of terrorism seeks to end, once and for all, the PA’s practice of rewarding murderers and their families with cash.
A lawsuit on behalf of American victims of terrorism seeks to end, once and for all, the PA’s practice of rewarding murderers and their families with cash.
L ast week, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas announced Hussein al-Sheikh, longtime insider and convicted terrorist, as his designated successor. In April, al-Sheikh told U.S. officials that the PA had officially stopped its hideous “pay for slay” program — cash rewards for the cold-blooded killing of Americans and Israelis. Yet last Saturday, just hours before his elevation was announced, the PA quietly disbursed yet another round of murderer salaries and stipends.
The mechanics of the program are grotesquely simple. The longer the prison sentence, the larger the stipend; the bloodier the attack, the richer the reward. Even when Ramallah slashes salaries for ordinary civil servants, payments to convicted killers and their families continue. Roughly 8 percent of the PA’s annual budget funds this obscene incentive system.
That is why American victims of Palestinian terrorism have filed a lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan exposing what the PA and its umbrella, the Palestine Liberation Organization, already know: despite their duplicitous assurances to the West, pay for slay has not actually ended.
Tragically, for one of us, this is personal: Stuart Force’s son, Taylor, a West Point graduate and U.S. Army officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, was murdered in 2016 while visiting Israel. The family of the terrorist that killed him has been receiving generous stipends ever since. When Congress found out about the murder of Taylor Force, lawmakers were rightly sickened. In 2018, Congress passed an overwhelmingly bipartisan law called the Taylor Force Act, which prohibits the U.S. government from resuming Palestinian aid until the payments to terrorists are stopped. Six years later, despite the law, despite donor pressure, and despite repeated PA pledges to an international audience to change, the payments continue.
Whenever foreign governments object, the PA simply rebrands the enterprise — moving the budget line from one ministry to another, calling it a “commission” or a “fund,” or most recently, the “Palestinian National Economic Empowerment Institution.” Abbas performs a familiar double act: Before Western diplomats he insists the stipends are being phased out; in Arabic, he vows, “Even if we have only one penny left, it will go to the prisoners and martyrs.”
Israel’s recent deal to exchange hostages for prisoners illustrates the cost of such duplicity. About 2,000 prisoners were released from Israeli prisons, including 250 terrorists serving life sentences for murder. To date, the PA has already paid these killers roughly $70 million.
Our new lawsuit highlights fresh, heartbreaking evidence. In May, one plaintiff, American citizen Chananel Gez, lost his wife Tzeela and their son after a Palestinian gunman opened fire on their car as they drove from their West Bank home to a hospital for her to give birth; their baby was delivered but died at 15 days. Within weeks the killer’s family began collecting a government stipend. The PA acted with impunity, assuming — as always — that the world would look away.
But Congress foresaw this scenario and this lawsuit when it passed the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act (PSJVTA) in 2019. The law makes clear that by continuing to fund attacks that kill Americans, the PA and PLO consent to U.S. jurisdiction. In April, the Supreme Court in Fuld v. PLO affirmed that framework, calling the fight against terrorism “an urgent objective of the highest order.” This new case invokes that law to demand the accountability that diplomacy has failed to deliver.
The timing matters. As President Trump’s peace plan gathers momentum and hope builds for a new Middle East, American victims are reminding the world that there can be no place in it for a government that institutionalizes murder. Ignoring this reality would only reward duplicity and entrench the violent pathologies the plan seeks to finally eradicate.
For the first time since the Oslo process, a U.S. initiative openly tries to combine immediate regional stabilization, a realistic security architecture for Israel, and a long-term pathway for Palestinian self-government. But mistakenly recognizing the PA as a peace partner while it pays killers only guarantees more funerals — American, Israeli, and Palestinian alike.
Mark Goldfeder is director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center and a law professor at Touro University.
Stuart Force is a former U.S. Air Force officer and pilot. He and his wife Robbi helped pass the anti-terror financing law named for their son Taylor.