RAMALLAH: President Mahmoud Abbas faced criticism from allies and foes alike on Tuesday over a decree overhauling payments to families of Palestinians killed or jailed by Israel, a move to satisfy a US demand that will likely deepen his unpopularity.
Palestinian Authority leader Abbas, 89, issued the decree on Monday overturning the system, long condemned by critics as rewarding attacks on Israel but viewed among Palestinians as a vital source of welfare for detainees’ families.
The sudden announcement seems aimed at removing a potential source of tension with US President Donald Trump and an attempt to preserve the PA’s role as Washington bolsters its pro-Israeli approach to the conflict, Palestinian analysts said.
“The goal is to try to open a good page with Trump at a time when Trump has completely turned his back on the Palestinians by calling for displacement” of Palestinians from Gaza, said Hani Al-Masri, a Palestinian political analyst in Ramallah.
Scrapping the system of salary-type payments, dubbed “pay for slay” by critics — a label rejected by Palestinians — has been a major demand of successive US administrations. Abbas had long resisted pressure to halt the program.
The PA will instead provide support to families of prisoners via a social welfare network, according to need rather than their length of imprisonment. Qadura Fares, the Palestinian official responsible for prisoner affairs, said between 35,000 and 40,000 families would be affected.
Fares, a member of Abbas’ Fatah Movement, told a news conference “a fireball” had been thrown in Abbas’ lap, underlining the huge sensitivities of ending a system introduced under the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in the 1990s.
Hamas condemns move
Beneficiaries have included families in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip and Palestinians living in Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere — as well as those considered for release under the phased Gaza war ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas.
Israel’s foreign ministry dismissed the change as a ruse, saying payments would continue through other channels.
Masri said the public reaction would depend on how the move was implemented, saying that if payments to prisoners were totally scrapped, “it will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”
“This decision weakens the legitimacy and popularity of the president, which is already weak,” he added.
Palestinian opinion polls consistently show Abbas to be unpopular among Palestinians.
The Palestinian militant group Hamas condemned the decree saying it amounted to abandoning the cause “of the prisoners, the wounded, and the families of the martyrs” at a “critical juncture in the history of our Palestinian cause.”
The Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority, established under interim peace accords with Israel three decades ago, exercises limited self rule over patches of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
The salaries and services it provides helped keep Abbas and his Fatah faction politically relevant in the face of expanding Israeli settlements and the political challenge posed by Hamas, which seized Gaza from Abbas’ control in 2007.
The decision comes as the PA faces mounting financial pressure from a slowdown in aid, a squeeze on a system of tax revenue transfers by Israel and a slump in contributions from Palestinians who have been shut out of the Israeli labor market by the war in Gaza.
Israel has been deducting the payments made by the authority from taxes collected on its behalf from goods that cross its territory to Palestinian areas.
The PA has appealed for more aid from Arab and European states to make up for the shortfall of billions of shekels but has so far struggled to make headway.
Abbas risks Palestinian backlash over overhaul of prisoner payments
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Abbas risks Palestinian backlash over overhaul of prisoner payments
- Announcement seems aimed at removing a potential source of tension with Trump and an attempt to preserve the PA’s role
Documentary highlights Israeli brutality
- ‘American Doctor’ shows bravery of men voluntarily going to work in hospitals repeatedly hit by Israeli army
- Despite a fragile ceasefire in place since October last year, there has been continued violence between Israeli forces and Hamas, which has seen Palestinian non-combatants killed, including dozens of children
PARK CITY, US: At the start of “American Doctor,” a new documentary about US medics working in hospitals in the Gaza Strip during the Israel-Hamas war, director Poh Si Teng initially declines to film pictures of dead Palestinian children that one of the doctors is trying to show her.
Teng worries that she will have to pixelate the gruesome scene to protect the dignity of the children.
“You’re not dignifying them unless you let their memory, their bodies, tell the story of this trauma, of this genocide. You’re not doing them a service by not showing them,” Jewish-American doctor Mark Perlmutter tells her.
“This is what my tax dollars did. That’s what your tax dollars did. That’s what my neighbor’s tax dollars did. They have the right to know the truth.
“You have the responsibility, as I do, to tell the truth.
You pixelate this, that’s journalistic malpractice.”
Teng’s unflinching film follows Perlmutter and two other American doctors — one Palestinian American and the other a non-practicing
Zoroastrian — as they try to treat the results of the unspeakable brutality visited on a largely civilian population in Gaza since Israel launched its retaliation for Hamas’s October 2023 attack.
Alongside the severed limbs and the open wounds, the doctors labor on with their Palestinian colleagues, we also see the trio’s attempts at advocacy — in Washington’s corridors of power and in Israeli and American media.
The documentary also depicts the practical difficulties they face — the surgical scrubs and antibiotics they have to smuggle across the border to get around the Israeli blockade, and the last-minute refusals of Israeli authorities to let them in.
And we see the bravery of men voluntarily going to work in hospitals that are repeatedly hit by the Israeli army.
Israel rejects accusations its numerous strikes against Gaza hospitals amount to war crimes, saying it is targeting “terrorists” in these facilities and claims Hamas operatives are holed up in tunnels underneath the hospitals.
The attacks include the so-called “double tap” strike on the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, in the south of the Strip, in August 2025 where the three men have worked.
Emergency responders and journalists who had rushed to the scene after a first projectile hit were killed when a second was fired at the same spot.
Feroze Sidwha, perhaps the most eloquent of the three doctors, repeatedly makes the case throughout the film that he has never seen any tunnels and that, in any case, even the presence of wounded fighters in a hospital does not make it a legitimate target.
“Americans deserve the opportunity to know what’s going on, what their money is being used for, and you know, just to decide. ‘Do you really want this being done?’,” he said at the Sundance Film Festival, where the film got its premiere on Friday.
“I’m pretty sure the answer is ‘no’. I just want to keep speaking out and letting people know they don’t have to be an accessory to child murder. But we all are, right now.”
The film is dedicated to the around 1,700 healthcare workers who have been killed since Israel launched its invasion in October 2023.
UN investigators have accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, a charge that Israel has denied as “distorted and false,” while accusing the authors of antisemitism.
Despite a fragile ceasefire in place since October last year, there has been continued violence between Israeli forces and Hamas, which has seen Palestinian non-combatants killed, including dozens of children, according to UNICEF.
Reporters Without Borders says nearly 220 journalists have died since the start of the war, making Israel the biggest killer of journalists worldwide for three years running.
The Sundance Film Festival runs until Feb. 1.
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