Trump Halts All Aid to the Palestinian Authority Security Forces

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Mahmoud Abbas likes to present himself, as head of the Palestinian Authority (PA), as the “moderate” alternative to Hamas. The idea seems to be that the PA’s largest faction, Fatah, does not engage directly in terrorism, and therefore the PA deserves the vast sums the American government has been providing it. But “off-duty” members of the PA’s security forces have engaged in terror attacks on Israelis in Judea and Samaria. The PA continues its “Pay-For-Slay” program, by providing large monthly stipends to imprisoned terrorists and to the families of terrorists who died while committing their attacks. The PA has recently tried to disguise those payments by having them sent not directly to their intended recipients, but first through another PA agency — an attempt to camouflage the “Pay-For-Slay” program that has fooled neither the Israelis nor the Americans. “Pay-For-Slay” both rewards past, and incentivizes future terrorism. Furthermore, the PA has failed to condemn the Hamas atrocities carried out on October 7, with some PA officials praising the attacks as part of the “Palestinian Resistance.”

Now the Trump administration has halted all aid to the Palestinian Authority’s Security Forces because of its members who have engaged in terrorist attacks against Israelis. More on this welcome development can be found here: “Trump Admin Freezes Funding to Palestinian Authority ‘Security Forces’ Behind Terror Attacks on Israelis,” by Adam Kredo, Washington Free Beacon, February 19, 2025:

The Trump administration froze funding for the Palestinian Authority Security Forces (PASF), a group that purportedly aims to crack down on terrorism in the West Bank but employs terrorists who have carried out attacks on Israelis.

The move, part of the administration’s broader global aid freeze, comes as the Palestinian Authority and its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, jockey for control of post-war Gaza. The Biden administration pushed to make the PASF a central player in its future plans for the war-torn strip, showering it with tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer cash even as it acknowledged that the aid could boost Hamas. Some of that money, issued just before the administration left power, allowed the PASF to conduct “firearms and ammunition” training, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

The Washington Post, which first reported the funding freeze, described the PASF as “the linchpin to the Palestinian Authority’s ability to maintain law and order” in both Gaza and the West Bank. The outlet did not mention the scores of attacks off-duty members of the forces have carried out against both Israeli soldiers and civilians.

Far from opposing all terrorism, members of the PA Security Forces have taken part in terrorist attacks on Israelis. Some have been “dual use” Palestinians, who try to crack down on members of rival groups hoping to replace the PA in Judea and Samaria — that is, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — insofar as those terrorists challenge the supremacy of the PA’s rule. But the PA remains an enemy of Israel; it simply wants to do the minimum against terrorists that will assure it of hundreds of millions of dollars in American assistance for its security services.

An investigation released last year by the watchdog group Palestinian Media Watch documented at least 55 such attacks since 2020. In February 2024, for example, a first lieutenant in the PASF opened fire on Israeli troops at a checkpoint near the northern West Bank city of Nablus. Another member of the forces, Capt. Ahmed Abdullah Abu Shalal, was a terrorist leader with the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, an internationally designated terror group. He was killed in an Israeli airstrike after carrying out an April 2023 shooting in East Jerusalem that wounded two Israeli civilians.

Before the freeze, Abbas reportedly sought more than $680 million in U.S. taxpayer funds to “ramp up security operations” in the West Bank and Gaza. The request came in mid-December, after President Donald Trump won the presidency but before his inauguration. His administration appears increasingly unlikely to grant it….

Abbas, making one last request of the patsies in the Biden administration before they left office, asked in mid-December for more than $680 million for his security forces. Too late: Biden was a lame duck, who did not even try to get Congress to approve that colossal request. And the Trump administration has not only refused Abbas’ request for more money to support the PA Security Forces (PASF), but ended altogether the previous financial support the Biden administration had provided to the PASF.

Mahmoud Abbas must be beside himself with impotent rage. As long as Trump is president, Mario Rubio is secretary of state, and Mike Waltz is national security adviser, there will be no flow of dollars to the corrupt, corrupting, and altogether meretricious Palestinian Authority. Trump had already frozen all other aid to the PA, with an exception made for the PA Security Forces; now he has ended even that. How will the PA survive? Can it count on European nations to take up the slack, when they are all scrambling to spend billions of dollars more on their own defense, so as to not just meet the 2% of GDP that NATO members are committed to spending on defense (but only 25 of its 32 members have been doing so), but far more that will now need to be spent, given the Russian threat to NATO’s eastern flank.

NATO head Mark Rutte now calls for 3% of GDP to be spent by each member, while the Americans, who have borne the lion’s share of NATO’s funding ever since its founding, are now calling for the other members of NATO to spend 5% of their GDP on defense spending. In such an environment, no NATO country will likely be willing to provide financial support to the PA. The only place for Abbas to find such support is from the rich Arab states of the Gulf. And they have been contributing very little to the PA for many years. Why, when they are now gearing up to spend billions of dollars on reconstruction in Gaza, would they change that policy?