Palestinian Authority Promised Terrorists More Than $200 Million in ‘Pay-To-Slay’ Payments After it 'Scrapped' Program

"The State Department formally determined this month that the Palestinian Authority paid more than $200 million to terrorists and their families in 2025, the same year PA president Mahmoud Abbas claimed he ended the ‘pay-to-slay’ program, according to a nonpublic notice provided to Congress and obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon.

Rather than ending these payments, the PA shifted to a new system that it hoped to hide from international donors at a time when the Ramallah-based government is jockeying for a role in postwar Gaza, the State Department disclosed for the first time. Israeli intelligence assessed that the PA funneled $144 million to terrorists and their families in 2024 and committed at least $214 million through 2025, while the State Department determined that the payments continued from March to August 2025 under a purportedly reformed welfare system.

‘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 State Department determined. ‘Despite changing the mechanism for doing so, the PA continued the payments to Palestinian terrorists and their families during the reporting period.’..."