Expert: $3K Per Month PA Salary for Halamish Killer Will Give ‘Momentum’ to Taylor Force Act
The e monthly salary of approximately $3,000 that the Palestinian Authority will pay to terrorist Omar al-Abed could be a powerful spur to a pending US legislative bill that would slash aid to the PA over its “martyr payments” policy, a leading Middle East expert told The Algemeiner on Tuesday.
“This is definitely going to put wind in the sails of the Taylor Force Act,” said Jonathan Schanzer, an expert on Palestinian politics at the Washington, DC-based Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) think tank.
Named in memory of former US Army officer Taylor Force, who was murdered in a Palestinian terrorist attack in Tel Aviv in March 2016, the act, if passed, will place severe restrictions on American aid money to the PA until it ends both incitement to terrorism and the “martyr payments” policy.
Al-Abed — who murdered three members of the Salomon family in the West Bank community of Halamish in a knife attack on Friday night, before being shot and wounded in the midst of his stabbing frenzy by an off-duty IDF soldier — is now in Israeli custody. Assuming he receives the maximum sentence for his crime, he can expect up to $3,500 every month from the PA — which calculates how much each terrorist receives by using a sliding scale that rewards the most severe acts of terror.
In addition, if any of al-Abed’s relatives are jailed alongside him, or if the Israeli authorities destroy the family home, the family can expect further payments from the PA’s “Martyr Fund” — whose existence dates back to the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964.
The fund’s monthly payments — totaling at least $300 million annually — far exceed the average monthly wage earned by Palestinian professionals, including PA civil servants.
Read more: Algeminer