CLAIM:
“Pay for slay” is not a real program run by the Palestinian Authority.
STATUS:
False
KEY COUNTERPOINTS:
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The Palestinian Authority Martyrs Fund is a documented, legislated government program with a dedicated budget line. The PA officially established the payment framework through the Law of Prisoners No. 19 (2004) and expanded it via Government Decision No. 15 (2013). These are not informal payments. They are codified in Palestinian law, administered through two distinct institutional channels: the Foundation for the Care of the Families of Martyrs and the Prisoners Fund. At its peak, the program consumed roughly 7 to 8 percent of the entire PA annual budget, amounting to approximately 330 million per year. A program requiring legislation, named institutions, and a share of a national budget is, by any definition, real.
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The payment structure is explicitly tiered by the severity and duration of incarceration, meaning larger attacks yield greater financial rewards. Under the legislated framework, monthly stipends to prisoners begin at 1,142 per month for sentences of five to ten years. The PA itself acknowledges that convicted terrorists are among the beneficiaries. Because sentence length correlates directly with attack severity, the payment structure functionally rewards more lethal violence with larger sums. This is not a welfare observation. It is a consequence of how Palestinian law designed the program.
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The United States Congress formally recognized the program’s existence and passed binding law in response to it. The Taylor Force Act, signed by President Trump on March 23, 2018, explicitly cites the PA’s payment practice and conditions U.S. economic aid on its full abolition. The Act’s findings state directly that the PA’s practice of paying salaries to terrorists in Israeli prisons and to families of deceased terrorists constitutes an incentive to commit acts of terror. A U.S. federal law does not address programs that do not exist. The Israeli Knesset passed parallel legislation in 2018 that deducts the equivalent amount from tax revenues transferred to the PA under the Oslo Accords.
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After years of defending the payments, the PA moved to restructure, not eliminate, the program under international pressure. In February 2025, PA President Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree formally canceling the Martyrs Fund legislation. However, reports from Palestinian Media Watch in early 2026 documented continued distributions through a new body, the Palestinian National Economic Empowerment Institution (PNEEI), including payments reaching convicted terrorists in Jordan and Lebanon. Critics maintain that the program was rebranded rather than ended. The sequence itself confirms the program existed: one cannot abolish what never existed, and one cannot restructure what was fabricated.
EVIDENCE:
Institutional structure: The Martyrs Fund operated through two bodies, the Foundation for the Care of the Families of Martyrs and the Prisoners Fund, both disbursing government-funded monthly stipends.
Budget documentation: As of 2016, the combined allocation was 4.4 billion annual budget. The Prisoners Ministry received 175 million.
Legislated payment tiers: Monthly payments ranged from 1,142 (five to ten years served), with the PA explicitly listing convicted terrorists as eligible recipients under Government Decision No. 15 of 2013.
Abbas on record defending the payments: In June 2017, Mahmoud Abbas called international pressure to stop the payments an aggression against the Palestinian people and publicly pledged that if the PA had only one penny left, it would go to prisoners and martyrs families.
U.S. legislative recognition: The Taylor Force Act (Pub. L. 115-141, signed March 23, 2018) conditioned all Economic Support Fund aid on full abolition of the payment system, citing the PA’s practice by name in its statutory findings.
Israeli enforcement: The 2018 Israeli Freeze Law mandates a dollar-for-dollar deduction in taxes transferred to the PA equivalent to what the PA pays through the program. From 2018 to 2023, the deducted sum exceeded one billion dollars.
Post-2025 continuation reports: In January 2026, Palestinian Media Watch documented distributions continuing through the PNEEI to recipients including Ahlam Tamimi, a convicted participant in the 2001 Sbarro restaurant bombing in Jerusalem.
PRIMARY SOURCES:
Washington Post Fact Checker, “Does the Palestinian Authority pay $350 million a year to ‘terrorists and their families’?”, March 14, 2018
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/03/14/does-the-palestinian-authority-pay-350-million-a-year-to-terrorists-and-their-families/?utm
Best balanced receipt source. The article reviewed PLO documentation, PA budget documents, and lawsuit documents. It confirms payments to convicted attackers, suicide bomber families, and specific cases including Hakim Awad and Ali Ja’ara.
“Documents obtained in a lawsuit against the PLO show that he was promoted and continued to receive a salary after he blew himself up in a 2004 suicide attack…”
“Payments continue to the family of the suicide bomber who killed 15 people… at a Sbarro cafe in Jerusalem… and to the bomb maker…”
Yet at the same time, Palestinians acknowledge making payments to the families of suicide bombers and people convicted of heinous attacks. Hakim Awad — the then-18-year-old militant mentioned by Netanyahu who murdered five family members in a West Bank settlement — receives about $14,000 a year. But because payments increase with the length of incarceration, Awad would be paid more than $1.9 million if he lived to 80, the male life expectancy in Israel.
↑↑↑ Best source!
Israel Policy Forum: Palestinian Prisoner and Martyr Payments Explained (April 2021) https://israelpolicyforum.org/2021/04/02/palestinian-prisoner-and-martyr-payments-explained/
Detailed breakdown of Government Decision No. 15 (2013), the tiered payment schedule, and the PA’s own framing of the program as welfare for people it considers prisoners of war. Covers both institutional channels and total annual cost.
↑↑↑ best source!
Times of Israel: PA Document Shows Pay-to-Slay Has Been Scrapped, New System in Place (September 2025)
https://www.timesofisrael.com/pa-document-shows-pay-to-slay-has-been-scrapped-new-system-in-place/
Covers the February 2025 Abbas decree, the establishment of the PNEEI, and the transition to needs-based criteria. Reports that 3,000 individuals were removed from eligibility and 2,000 added. Confirms the program existed and was formally restructured.
↑↑↑ best source!
Jerusalem Post: PA Pay-for-Slay Payments Persist in Jordan and Lebanon (January 2026) https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-884874
Documents continued distributions through the PNEEI following the announced abolition, including payments to Ahlam Tamimi. Based on Palestinian Media Watch reporting. Relevant to the argument that the restructuring was cosmetic.
↑↑↑ mid source
JCPA: The Taylor Force Act, the October 7 Massacre, and the PA Pay-for-Slay Terror Reward Policy (January 2025)
https://jcpa.org/the-taylor-force-act-the-october-7-massacre-and-the-pas-pay-for-slay-terror-reward-policy/ Aggregates data from Israeli Ministry of Defense reports showing PA terror reward payments totaling over 3.7 billion shekels from 2018 to 2023. References the 2004 Law of Prisoners as the statutory foundation.
↑↑↑ mid source
Britannica: What Is Pay for Slay (October 2025)
https://www.britannica.com/topic/What-Is-Pay-for-Slay
Neutral overview covering program history, both sides of the debate, the February 2025 Abbas decree, and the needs-based restructuring. Useful for framing the other side accurately.
↑↑↑ worst source! 😭
STRONGEST COUNTER ARGUMENTS WORTH KNOWING:
The PA and its defenders argue that the Martyrs Fund was a social welfare program for families left without income after a member was killed or imprisoned by an Israeli military justice system critics describe as lacking due process. They point out that roughly one in five Palestinians has been arrested by Israel at least once, and that many prisoners held for political protest, not violent acts, were swept into the same payment framework. Under this framing, the term pay for slay misrepresents a humanitarian mechanism as a terrorism incentive. Defenders also cite the absence of evidence that individual attackers pre-calculated the financial benefit to their family as a motive for violence. In the chaos of daily confrontations between Palestinian residents and Israeli forces, the vast majority of violent incidents were not premeditated.
The more structurally serious counter-argument is the rebranding critique in reverse: that the 2025 restructuring proves the old system was, at least nominally, distinct from what critics described. Critics of the critics argue that by folding the program into a needs-based framework, the PA demonstrated that it was always possible to support vulnerable families without conditioning payments on the nature of a family member’s crime. This does not help the claim that pay for slay was never real. It does complicate the argument that the program was purely a terrorism incentive rather than a poorly designed welfare system with predictable perverse effects.
NOTES:
In debate, the claim that pay for slay is fabricated or propaganda collapses immediately against the Taylor Force Act. Ask the opponent to explain why a bipartisan U.S. Congress passed binding law addressing a program that does not exist. The burden is on the claim, not the rebuttal.
The naming dispute is a distraction. The term pay for slay is a critics label, not the PA’s official title. The PA called it the Martyrs Fund. The underlying payment structure, the legislation, the tiered payout schedule, and the budget allocations are not in dispute even among defenders of the program. Concede the label if necessary, then pivot to the documented structure.
Watch for the welfare framing as a deflection. The strongest version of the opposing argument is that the program was social welfare, not terrorism incentive. This is a different claim than the one in this note. Do not let an opponent shift from the existence question to the motivation question without acknowledging the shift.
Abbas’s February 2025 decree is often cited as proof that the old system no longer exists. The correct response is that reports from January 2026 document continued distributions under a new institutional name. Acknowledge the decree, then introduce the persistence evidence. Avoid overclaiming that nothing changed. The stronger position is: the program was restructured, not abolished, and payments to convicted terrorists have been documented as recently as January 2026.
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