Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Jewish leaders in New York City Sunday night, "I personally believe that under the new circumstances, with a much greater cooperation between us and the Palestinian government, we can take perhaps more risks than we took in the past," he said.

He explicitly stated that Israel can hand over to the Palestinian Authority (PA) up to half of the $700 million in tax revenue that has been withheld the past year. "We will defreeze monies that we kept under our control because we didn't want these monies to be taken by Hamas to be used as part of a terrorist action," the Prime Minister added.