Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas ousted his finance minister on Monday for allowing payments to Palestinian security prisoners through an old mechanism that awarded them based on the length of their sentence, a Palestinian official and a second source familiar with the matter revealed to The Times of Israel.

Abbas’s office announced earlier Monday, through the PA’s official Wafa news outlet, that PA Planning and International Cooperation Minister Estephan Salameh had replaced Omar Bitar as finance minister, but did not provide a reason for the cabinet shuffle.

The two sources told The Times of Israel that Bitar’s dismissal followed an internal investigation revealing that he had authorized payments to some Palestinian security prisoners outside the new system that the PA established earlier this year, which conditioned those welfare stipends strictly on financial need, rather than on the length of one’s sentence.

The reform had long been demanded by the US, Israel, and many of the PA’s Arab and European backers, with some accusing Ramallah of incentivizing attacks on Israelis and dubbing the old policy “pay-to-slay.”

Abbas signed a decree in February scrapping the old system and publicly reiterated that it was no longer in place in remarks to the UN General Assembly in September.

While the vast majority of payments under the old system had indeed ceased, as the new system came into place, a small portion of prisoner families managed to receive recent stipends through the old payment mechanism, including inmates who were incarcerated after the reform was announced, the two sources told The Times of Israel.

The development highlighted the pressure that Ramallah is facing from families of prisoners who are fuming over the slashing of payments they had been receiving for years.

The Palestinian official said Abbas’s........

© The Times of Israel