An Israeli law last year set a deadline of December 31, 2020, for banks to stop handling the payments and to permanently close the relevant accounts. The accounts were closed by the end of the year to avoid possible penalties. The PA paid terrorists three months worth of the monthly payments near the end of last year in preparation for the move.
The law states that any person that makes a financial transaction which "supports, promotes, fund or rewards" terror activities will be subject to a prison sentence of up to 10 years, according to a report by the NGO Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). The law was originally supposed to come into effect on May 9, 2020, in the West Bank.
Three weeks before the law was to come into effect, PMW warned banks of their liability if they were to continue payments to terrorists. The Association of Banks in Palestine wrote to the PA's Finance Minister to describe the consequences the banks will go through if they maintained accounts that make payments to terrorists.
“Based on the plenary session of the Association of Banks [in Palestine], all the banks hereby ask Your Honor to stop transferring any sums into these accounts," wrote the bank representatives. "The banks will transfer the balances in these accounts to the Ministry of Finance’s account.”
The decision to distribute the payments through the postal bank was made due to the fact that the postal bank is for mail transactions and is not a banking institution and is therefore not subject to the law. Eventually, ATMs will be installed and cards will be issued to distribute the payments.
The PA is also trying to conceal the "pay-for-slay" payments by creating thousands of new civil and security service positions that can only be held by those imprisoned in Israel, meaning that the payments will be disguised as paychecks, according to PMW.
"Pay-for-slay" payments can reach up to NIS 12,000 per month, according to the Shurat HaDin organization, which has filed a number of lawsuits on the issue to the International Criminal Court, also known as the Hague, in the past decade. To date, the Hague has not issued any response to the lawsuits.
Jerusalem Post Staff and Michael Starr contributed to this report.