The PA's Election Rules Just Confessed Everything About Pay-for-Slay
Mahmoud Abbas claims the terror-salary program is dead — then his own election commission hands it a certificate of life.
There is a particular kind of arrogance that only a regime certain of its own impunity can afford — the kind that puts its most nefarious policies in writing, in a routine bureaucratic circular, and dares the world to notice.
The Palestinian Authority has just done exactly that.
Ahead of upcoming PA local elections, the PA Central Elections Commission issued guidance on who must resign before submitting a candidacy application. The answer, according to commission spokesman Fareed Taamallah, is straightforward: any PA employee who "holds a position, receives his salary from the state, and is currently engaged in his work is required to resign from his position." Give up your job. Give up your paycheck. Then you may run.
Taamallah was equally clear about who faces no such requirement. The exemptions include retirees, prisoners, the wounded — that is, the two categories of terrorists on the PA payroll — and recipients of social benefits. A nurse, a teacher, an engineer who draws a salary from the PA bureaucracy must forfeit that income to seek elected office. A man imprisoned for murdering Israelis, or wounded while carrying out an attack against them, pockets his terror stipend and files his candidacy papers without a second thought.
Read that twice. The Palestinian Authority has encoded into its election law a privilege for terrorists that it explicitly denies to its own civil servants.
This is not a slip. It is not an oversight. It is the logical consequence of a program that Mahmoud Abbas declared finished — and then continued under different labels, different budget lines, different agency names. According to a February 2026 analysis by Palestinian Media Watch, the PA will distribute $315 million this year to 23,500 terrorists and their families, funneling the payments through its security forces, civil service payroll, and pension office — precisely to fool Western donors who conditioned their money on the program's abolition. More than 10,000 former inmates receive monthly stipends of between roughly $1,280 and $3,800 each. An additional 6,000 terror-reward recipients have had their files quietly transferred to the pension program, called one by one to confirm their bank account numbers as though they were ordinary retirees.
Abbas declared pay-to-slay dead in February 2025. The elections commission just filed the death certificate in the recycling bin.
I have spent decades in U.S. federal courts pursuing the financial architecture that keeps terrorism alive — suing Iran, Syria, North Korea, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority itself on behalf of victims and their families, using statutes like the Antiterrorism Act of 1990 and the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 as the legal weapon of choice. The through-line in every case is the same: follow the money, name who pays, make terror too expensive to continue. What the PA elections commission has now handed us is something rare — a self-incriminating document, produced voluntarily, by the very entity that claims to have reformed.
The State Department has already formally determined that the PA shifted its payments to new institutional vehicles to conceal them from Western donors. A senior department official said plainly that "attempts by the Palestinian Authority to conceal payments to relatives of those who have murdered both Americans and Israelis are unacceptable," and that a PA seeking any role in postwar Gaza "must stop these payments immediately." That was May. Here we are in September, and the PA's election rules have confirmed that nothing has stopped — not the payments, and certainly not the contempt for anyone foolish enough to believe Abbas's promises.
The Taylor Force Act, signed in March 2018, was supposed to drain the financial swamp by conditioning U.S. economic assistance to the PA on the cessation of pay-to-slay. Congress meant it as a tourniquet. What the PA did was quietly apply a different bandage, give the wound a new name, and keep bleeding the program forward — all while collecting donor dollars routed through civil service and security-force budgets that escape the Act's strictest triggers.
The elections commission circular strips away the last pretense. The PA does not merely tolerate pay-to-slay; it has institutionalized its recipients as a privileged class. Ordinary Palestinians serve their people through public employment and are told they must sacrifice their livelihoods for the right to seek office. Terrorists who attacked Israelis are excused that sacrifice entirely.
Washington, Brussels, and every capital that has continued writing checks to Ramallah needs to absorb what Taamallah put on the record on September 7, 2026. This is not an allegation from an Israeli government source, not a deduction from a watchdog report — it is the PA's own election bureaucracy, in its own voice, confirming that prisoner stipends continue and that their recipients enjoy rights no PA employee enjoys.
The PA has signed its own confession. The only question now is whether its donors have the will to read it.