The Palestinian Authority (PA) has spent years assuring the West that its infamous “pay-for-slay" system was being reformed, phased out, or transformed into ordinary welfare. Then, just several weeks ago, a Palestinian Arab court in Ramallah said the quiet part out loud.
On May 4, 2026, the Ramallah Administrative Court overturned a Palestinian Authority decision that had suspended payments to prisoner Firas Ahmad Hassan since mid-2025, according to the Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). The court ordered the PA finance minister to resume his salary. More importantly, according to the Independent Commission for Human Rights, the decision could serve as a precedent for reinstating payments to approximately 1,600 other prisoners whose stipends were cut.
That ruling is not a bureaucratic footnote. It is a strategic exposure.
For months, the PA presented itself to Washington and Europe as having restructured the prisoner and “martyr" payment system. In February 2025, Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree purporting to overturn the old payment framework and transfer disbursements to a new body affiliated with his office, with payments supposedly moved into a need-based welfare mechanism. Reuters reported at the time that the new mechanism had not been fully disclosed.
PMW warned that this was not genuine reform but a shell game: a rebranding operation designed to hide the same incentive structure from Western donor governments. The Ramallah court has now provided the clearest evidence yet that the underlying legal and political commitment remains intact.
PMW reports that attorney Ahmad Nasra, representing the legal challenge, argued that the suspension of Hassan’s salary was unlawful under Palestinian Authority law. The case relied on Article 22 of the amended Palestinian Authority Basic Law, which frames care for prisoners, the wounded, and the families of “martyrs" as a national duty, as well as protections under the Prisoners and Released Prisoners Law. Because the Ministry of Finance had cut the payments without issuing a formal written order, the court treated the suspension as an invalid “implied decision" and cancelled it.
In plain English: the PA’s own legal system says these payments are not discretionary charity. They are a protected national obligation.
That is the scandal.
For years, Western diplomats have tried to treat the Palestinian Authority as a flawed but salvageable institution-one that merely needed better governance, better accounting, and better incentives. But “pay-for-slay" is not a clerical defect in Ramallah’s accounting system. It is a window into the PA’s political theology. Terrorists are not treated as criminals. They are treated as national assets and heroes.
The PA names schools, community centers, public squares, and sports stadiums after individuals who have committed acts of terrorism against Israelis, primarily in \judea, Samaria and Gaza. This is part of an official policy to honor those involved in attacking Israeli civilians.
The payment structure has long reflected that worldview. According to Palestinian Media Watch and other Israeli reporting, stipends for security prisoners have historically risen with the length of sentence, with payments reported in the range of roughly $400 to $3,400 per month. The longer the sentence, the greater the reward. Those convicted of the most serious attacks, therefore, have stood to receive the largest salaries.
This is the moral inversion at the heart of the system. In a normal society, prison is a penalty. Under the PA’s national mythology, prison becomes credentialing. Murder becomes service. A life sentence becomes a pension qualification.
The same ecosystem extends to released prisoners and the families of dead attackers, whom the PA honors as “martyrs." These benefits are not marginal. They create status, income, health benefits, educational benefits, and institutional prestige for the families of those who targeted Israelis. The message to the next generation is unmistakable: violence against Jews and Israelis is not only justified; it is compensated.
The Taylor Force Act was designed to confront precisely this obscenity.
Enacted in 2018, the law was named for Taylor Force, an American graduate student and U.S. Army veteran murdered by a Palestinian Arab terrorist in Jaffa in 2016. The Act conditions certain U.S. Economic Support Fund assistance to Judea and Samaria and Gaza on the PA and PLO ending payments that reward terrorism, publicly condemning violence, and cooperating with investigations. It includes humanitarian carve-outs for programs such as the East Jerusalem Hospital Network, wastewater projects, and children’s vaccinations.
The legal point matters: the Taylor Force Act does not merely express displeasure. It recognizes that money is fungible. A donor dollar that pays for one PA line item frees up another PA dollar to fund another. Western officials may prefer not to look at the full ledger, but the ledger exists.
In 2026, the issue is no longer theoretical. A U.S. State Department notification to Congress reportedly found that the PA distributed roughly $156 million in “pay-for-slay" stipends during 2025, including about $126 million to imprisoned and released terrorists and roughly $30 million to families of those killed while carrying out attacks.
This occurred while the PA was in deep fiscal crisis, notes The Times of Israel . Israel’s Finance Ministry confirmed in April 2026 that it had not released PA tax revenues for about a year, while the PA said “not a single shekel" of tax revenue had been transferred during that period. Those clearance revenues account for roughly 60 percent of PA income.
So the question is simple: when Ramallah is short on cash, what does it protect?
Not reform. Not transparency. Not coexistence.
It protects the prisoner salaries.
That is why the court ruling matters. It cuts through the diplomatic fog. It reveals that the PA’s “reform" was not a moral transformation. It was a compliance strategy aimed at Washington and Brussels.
Sander Gerber, a principal architect of the campaign that led to the Taylor Force Act, warned in 2025 that Abbas’s decree was ambiguous and did not clearly end the Prisoners Club or the Martyrs Fund. His skepticism now looks prescient. If the PA had truly ended the system, why would its own court be ordering prisoner payments restored?
Europe’s role is even more troubling. The European Union announced a three-year package worth approximately €1.6 billion for the Palestinian Authority, including €620 million for financial support and reform, according to Reuters. Brussels speaks constantly about governance, credibility, and institutional reform. Yet the PA’s internal legal architecture continues to protect payments to terrorists and their families.
That contradiction cannot be wished away. A “revitalized" Palestinian Authority cannot be built on a pension system for murderers. A postwar Gaza governance plan cannot depend on an institution that legally sanctifies the financial reward of terrorism. And Western governments cannot credibly condemn terrorism while underwriting a political structure that treats terrorists as salaried national heroes.
None of this should surprise anyone who has paid attention to the ideological record.
Article 9 of the Palestinian National Charter declares: “Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine." The same article frames armed struggle not as a temporary tactic, but as an overarching strategy.
That is the continuity the West keeps trying to avoid. The PA can rename ministries, shift databases, create new institutions, and issue decrees in polished diplomatic language. But when its own court is asked whether prisoner stipends can be cut, the answer comes back clearly: no.
Pay-for-slay did not disappear.
It merely changed clothes.
Now, thanks to a court in Ramallah, it has come out of the closet.
Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and serves onthe advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference for Israel.