The move targets the PA’s infamous ‘pay for slay’ program
The State Department on Thursday imposed sanctions on Palestinian leadership officials in the West Bank for “continuing to support terrorism, including incitement and glorification of violence.”
The department said the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which govern the West Bank, have failed to comply with the 1989 PLO Commitments Compliance Act and the 2002 Middle East Peace Commitments Act.
The violations include “taking actions to internationalize its conflict with Israel such as through the International Criminal Court (ICC),” the “incitement and glorification of violence (especially in textbooks),” and “providing payments and benefits in support of terrorism to Palestinian terrorists and their families,” according to a statement from the State Department.
The PA has long had a policy of offering financial support to terrorists who kill Israelis, known as “pay for slay.” While PA president Mahmoud Abbas announced the end of the policy earlier this year, he also said that “even if we have [only] one penny left, it is for the prisoners and Martyrs.” There is no evidence, according to the Council on Foreign Relations’ Elliott Abrams, that the PA ever stopped providing financial support to terrorists.
The Trump administration announced that it will “deny visas to PLO members and PA officials” as part of the sanctions. State Department officials previously told the Washington Free Beacon that denying visas for PA members was on the table ahead of this week’s United Nations summit intended to galvanize international support for a Palestinian state. The United States opposed the conference, contending that statehood only serves as a reward for Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks against Israel.
The conference, which France and Saudi Arabia hosted together, is seen as a precursor for a more formal recognition of a Palestinian state that will take place at the U.N. headquarters in September. President Donald Trump has said he does not believe Western countries should participate, going so far as to proclaim it will be “very hard” for Canada and the United States to come to terms on a trade deal after the former announced its plans to recognize a Palestinian state later this year.
While supporters of a Palestinian state often mention the PA as a more moderate governing authority compared to Hamas in Gaza, recent reports indicate that its leaders continue to support terrorism.
Israeli education watchdog IMPACT-SE reported in March that the PA’s latest curriculum, developed for schools in Gaza, “retained content containing antisemitism, glorification and justification of violence and terrorism, encouragement of martyrdom and jihad, dehumanization and demonization of Israel, and the erasure of Israel from maps.”
The PA’s 11th-grade history curriculum for Gazan schools, for instance, “implies that Jews control the world by using classic antisemitic iconography of a hand bearing a Star of David gripping a globe.”
A third-grade math lesson “instructs students to spell out in digits the number of martyrs during the First Intifada,” while lessons on statistics include “frequency tables tracking the number of ‘martyrs’ killed by Israel.” Lesson plans the PA prepared for Gazan children also erase the state of Israel from maps and refer to the Jewish state as the “Zionist Occupation.”
Abbas has also openly promoted the ICC campaign against Israel mentioned in the sanctions announcement. As a report from the Palestinian Media Watch organization states, Abbas said in May that “the biggest ‘no’ that [he] told the Americans, was when they pressured [him] not to approach the international courts—the ICC” and bragged about going to the ICC in violation of agreements the PA had signed.
The State Department in the sanctions announcement noted that neither the PA nor the PLO have held up their ends of various agreements.
“It is in our national security interests to impose consequences and hold the PLO and PA accountable for not complying with their commitments and undermining the prospects for peace.”
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