If the Palestinian Authority really prioritizes “treatments to citizens,” all it has had to is cancel payments to terrorists.
Nan Jacques Zilberdik, Palestinian Media Watch
“The great shortage in aid to the Palestinian health sector has led to a severe shortage in medicine, and especially medicine for cancer patients,” PA Minister of Health Mai Al-Kaila stated recently at a meeting with supporters and donors to the Palestinian health sector.
Al-Kaila blamed Israel and international donors for this, stating it is “a result of the financial siege that the occupation is attempting to impose on Palestine and the shortage in international aid.”
But is that really true? No, it isn’t.
Is there a part of the PA budget that could have been allocated to pay for medicine for cancer patients and other things needed in the PA health sector? Yes, there is.
The so-called “financial siege” imposed by Israel on the PA refers to Israel’s Anti “Pay-for-Slay” Law according to which Israel deducts a sum equal to the amount of money the PA spends on salaries to terrorists from the taxes Israel collects on behalf of the PA. Likewise, some international donors have frozen their funding to the PA because of this PA policy of rewarding terrorists who have attacked, murdered, and wounded Israeli civilians. Israel and these foreign donors have demanded the PA cease to reward and incentivize terror with generous salaries in order to resume the tax transfer and the funding.
Other donors, including the EU, have suspended funding to the PA due to the problematic content in PA schoolbooks, demanding that the PA edit out antisemitic, violent, and hateful content before they resume funding.
So if the PA and Minister of Health Al-Kaila really did prioritize “treatments to citizens,” all they had to do was cancel the terror payments. According to Palestinian Media Watch’s estimates, in 2021 alone, the PA squandered no less than 841 million shekels ($270.75 million) paying terror rewards!
But the PA is not putting its law-abiding citizens first. Not even the sick ones among them, and not even kids with cancer as Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) documented already in 2019 when the PA decided to stop sending its citizens in need of medical treatment to Israel because Israel refused to transfer the money the PA spent last year on salaries to terrorists.
Luckily for the sick Palestinians, the EU has just decided to turn a blind eye to the continued PA terror salaries and the contents of the textbooks and announced that “the European Commission has approved a new bilateral allocation to Palestine worth €224.8 million.“ Some of the funds are allocated specifically to “referrals to the East Jerusalem Hospitals” and “purchase of COVID-19 vaccines.”