Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar has been warning his counterparts not to believe the Palestinian Authority’s claim that it ended its payments to terrorists and their families, his office confirmed to Jewish Insider on Sunday.

When Sa’ar met with European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs Kaja Kallas last month, he showed her a video of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas at a Fatah Revolutionary Council in which he said of those who carry out terror attacks against Israelis: “Even if we only have one cent left, it will be for the prisoners and martyrs … They are more precious than all of us combined.”

Abbas’ comments, which were reported by JI, referred to the PA’s “Martyrs’ Fund,” nicknamed “pay for slay” by its critics. The PA has paid monthly salaries to terrorists in prison and the families of terrorists killed by Israel for decades, paying over $1 billion from 2018-2024.

The PA announced on Feb. 10 that Abbas was “revoking the [laws] … related to the system of paying financial allowances to the families of prisoners, martyrs and the wounded.” 

While there were news reports that the “pay for slay” policy was ending as a gesture to President Donald Trump, a closer read of the announcement indicated that it was a change in the payment system, which would be taken over by the Palestinian National Foundation for Economic Empowerment, which is “managed by a board of trustees appointed by the president.” The PA previously adopted a similar accounting trick in 2014, amid Western pressure to stop paying terrorists.

Sa’ar said in an interview published in Hebrew weekly Makor Rishon that Abbas “told his people that they are continuing to pay, and in practicality, they are continuing to pay in a different way, and trying to fool the international community.” 

“In the beginning, right after the PA’s announcement, I heard responses from European countries like Germany who praised it,” Sa’ar added. “Today they are not repeating what they said.”

Washington, the Israeli foreign minister said, “doesn’t buy [the Palestinians’] deceit.”

IDF Lt.-Col (res.) Maurice Hirsch, director of the Initiative for Palestinian Authority Accountability and Reform in the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs and the former director of the Military Prosecution for Judea and Samaria, warned that the “new tactic to hide the payments” is meant to convince the Trump administration to resume U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority, which U.S. law conditions on the PA abolishing the incentive system.

Hirsch noted in a new paper for the JCFA that there is an “absence of any public outcry by the terrorists and their families who should have suddenly lost a substantial source of their income,” further indicating that the payments have continued.

Hirsch also pointed out that U.S. legislation adopted by the Obama administration bars Washington “from providing the vast majority of the U.S. aid to the PA if it is engaged in and supports a judicially authorized investigation of Israel by the International Criminal Court.”

”Since the [Palestinian Liberation Organization]-PA did initiate and is supporting the ICC investigation of Israel, regardless of whether the PLO-PA has legitimately abandoned its ‘pay for slay’ policy, it will still not be able to receive U.S. aid,” Hirsch added.

Israel also has a law meant to discourage Ramallah from continuing the policy, by which it freezes the equivalent amount paid to terrorists from the taxes and tariffs Jerusalem collects for the PA in accordance with the Oslo Accords.

Hirsch estimated that the PA lost over $2 billion in 2018-2024 as a result of Israeli law and the Taylor Force Act, the U.S. law stopping aid until the terror payments end.

The Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee advanced legislation on Sunday that would unfreeze the funds Israel blocked due to terrorist payments — and have it enter Israel’s coffers.

The committee’s chairman, Likud’s Yuli Edelstein, said that the money will go to the families of victims of terrorism, and called the bill “an important additional step in our uncompromising war against Palestinian terrorism.”

”An entity that pays money according to a terrorism price list is a terrorist entity,” Edelstein added, referring to the fact that the payments increase according to the severity of the crime for which the terrorists are convicted. “If the [PA] lines the pockets of terror, we will cut off its pockets.”