The US State Department has claimed that the Palestinian Authority (PA) made payments to convicted terrorists under the so-called “pay-for-slay” scheme despite pledging to end the funding altogether last year.
Pay-for-slay, officially named the PA Martyrs Fund, has been running since the late 1960s and sees the authority provide financial support for the families of Palestinians convicted of terror offences in Israel.
Most contentiously, the size of the payout increases based on the severity of the offence and the length of the sentence, leading to accusations from Israel that the fund actively incentivises terrorist murders.
PA President Mahmoud Abbas announced in February last year that the scheme would come to an end, ostensibly as a step towards a two-state solution.
However, per the Washington Free Beacon, a private report compiled by the State Department and filed to Congress concluded that the PA “provided payments to convicted terrorists released from Israeli prisons in October 2025 under President Trump's 20-point peace plan”.
It also reportedly found that the authority “incited and glorified violence, including on social media and media outlets” and “supported terrorism via educational materials and summer camps”.
It comes after the department reportedly filed a "nonpublic notice" ahead of its final report last January, which itself found that the PA had made pay-for-slay payments to the families of terrorists.
"The old Palestinian system of compensation for Palestinian terrorists and the families of terrorists killed in the course of committing such acts of terrorism gradually transferred responsibility for compensation to the Palestinian National Foundation for Economic Empowerment (PNEEI) under the guise of social welfare," the filing reportedly read.
"Despite changing the mechanism for doing so, the PA continued the payments to Palestinian terrorists and their families during the reporting period."
The department also reportedly said it shared Israeli intelligence assessments that these payments totalled more than $140 million in 2024 and increased to approaching $220 million in 2025.
Commenting on the filings, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) told the Beacon: “The Palestinian Authority has been inciting terrorism and undermining peace for decades.
"They've never lived up to the commitments they've made to the United States, and they've always been allowed to get away with it. President Trump has made it clear that their behaviour is unacceptable, and much more should be done to hold them accountable for the violence they cause.”
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