Janet Yellen
Janet YellenReuters

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen together with counterparts from several other nations has sent a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressing fears that the Palestinian Authority may financially collapse due to the policies of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, Axios reported on Sunday.

Smotrich made several demands of the PA banks to prevent the illicit funding of terrorism. Until those conditions are met, the minister refuses to approve the extension of the financial correspondence between banks in Israel and the PA, which would be critical to keep the Palestinian banks, and by extension the PA, afloat.

While US officials say the Biden administration told Israel last week it had determined that the banks have met Smotrich's conditions, they fear the minister will still not approve the correspondence before the October 31st deadline.

With the deadline looming, Treasury Secretary Yellen, as well as her counterparts from Japan, Canada, the EU, the UK, the Netherlands, Australia, and France, sent Prime Minister Netanyahu a letter urging him to take steps for the extension to be approved.

"We write to emphasize our fear that actions taken by some members of your government to deny the West Bank access to financial resources endangers Israel's security and threatens to further destabilize the entire region in an already perilous moment," the ministers wrote.

According to the letter, if the extension is not improved, more than $13 billion in trade facilitated by the ties between Israeli and Palestinian banks will cease, "damaging Israel's economy and exacerbating an already dire economic situation in the West Bank."

They claimed that in such a scenario, finance flows would become less transparent and thus more dangerous, donor funds needed to stabilize the PA economy could be disrupted and Judea and Samaria and the Palestinian Authority would be destabilized.