The Palestine Donor Group meets in Brussels on Monday, bringing together representatives of EU countries, alongside Mohammad Mustafa, the Palestinian Authority (PA) prime minister, and Kaja Kallas.

The donor conference is an opportunity for the European Commission to build international support for a reformed PA, including getting the US on board.

On the agenda is an assessment of the PA’s pledge to dismantle the long-standing, so-called pay-for-slay system, under which payments were made to convicted terrorists and their families.

Critics have long argued that, because the size of the payments increased with the severity of the offence, international funding effectively helped sustain financial incentives for murder and terrorism.

The question will loom large after the US state department concluded that the PA had not ended the payments in a report submitted to Congress in April.

According to the report, PA Finance Minister Estephan Salameh reaffirmed in February that the scheme remained in place: “We have not abandoned any Palestinian resident, whether they are prisoners or families of martyrs and wounded. This is a clear fundamental issue.”

Israeli security agencies also say there have been significant changes in how the payments are administered.

“The PA uses a system of deception to create the impression that it had merged all payments under a single track based strictly on social needs while in fact it continues to pay terrorists and their families under the radar,” Israeli security officials told Euractiv during a visit to Berlin before presenting their findings to officials in Brussels later this week.

“A regular accounting audit will not find irregularities,” an Israeli official said, arguing that uncovering the system requires intelligence capabilities comparable to those used in complex money-laundering investigations.

Some of the alleged methods used to deceive are rather conventional, though. According to the Israeli officials, PA officials are handing out the money in cash or giving fake jobs to released terrorists so they could receive a regular salary.

According to the Israeli assessment, “approximately €140 million, probably equivalent to between one-third and one-half of the EU’s annual funding for the PA, went into these channels.”

“It is not a phasing-out of the pay-for-slay policy. Rather, the money has gone underground through a systematic effort to make these channels covert and clandestine,” an official said.

Johannes Volkmann, a member of the foreign affairs committee in the German parliament, said the allegations warranted close scrutiny, particularly given Germany’s role as one of the PA’s largest donors.

“Reports that so-called martyr payments are continuing through new channels to convicted terrorists in the PA are deeply concerning,” Volkmann said.

“International donors must conduct rigorous oversight to ensure that Western taxpayers’ money does not indirectly subsidise perpetrators of violence.”

(bw, mm)