“President Mahmud Abbas… issued a decree to cancel articles in the laws and regulations related to the system of paying financial allocations to the families of prisoners, martyrs and the wounded,” the official Wafa news agency reported.
The families will remain eligible for financial benefits under the Palestinian social welfare system, according to criteria that apply to everyone, the report said.
The details of the implementation of the decree, which is likely to affect thousands of people, remain unclear.
Wafa said the programmes supporting prisoners’ families would be transferred to an independent foundation, the Palestinian national economic development institute.
Hamas and the Palestinian armed group Islamic Jihad, both designated “terrorist” groups by Israel and other countries, criticised Abbas’s decision.
“This behaviour flies in the face of patriotism,” Hamas said in a statement, calling for the decree to be rescinded.
The Palestinian Authority (PA), dominated by rivals of Hamas, is based in the occupied West Bank.
Israel has long denounced the payments to families of Palestinian attackers, and the Israeli government has cited the practice as a reason to freeze funds for the PA.
“This is a new deception scheme by the Palestinian Authority, which intends to continue paying terrorists and their families through alternative payment channels,” Israel’s foreign ministry spokesman Oren Marmorstein posted on X.
Contested benefits
The PA’s benefit system has also been criticised by other countries, including the US and the Netherlands.
In 2018, during his first term as US president, Donald Trump signed into law rules suspending financial assistance to the PA as long as it continued to pay benefits to Palestinians linked to “terrorist” entities, according to the criteria of the Israeli authorities.
The PA has previously said the funds were a way of supporting families who have lost income, and who might suffer the seizure or demolition of their property by Israel.
To circumvent this international pressure, the PA has already amended the system several times, seeking covert ways of maintaining it.