Israel has control over the Palestinian Authority’s finances, and is slowly strangling its healthcare system. By restricting funds and limiting Palestinians from purchasing private healthcare by barring them from working in Israel, Israel is further driving the population into extinction.
Reposted from Haaretz, June 1, 2026
Israel’s policy of withholding all the customs and other fees it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority has created a kind of chain reaction that harms every aspect of Palestinian life in the West Bank. The worst damage has been to the public health system and its ability to provide proper care, to prevent people with chronic illnesses from deteriorating, and to maintain the quality of lifesaving treatments.
As of May, Israel held some 14 billion shekels ($5 billion) belonging to the PA. As of last week, the Palestinian Health Ministry’s debts had reached around 2.6 billion shekels (almost the entire budget for 2025). Roughly half that amount is owed to Palestinian companies that make or import medicine, and the remainder to private hospitals to which patients have been referred due either to the long waits at the public hospitals or because they cannot provide needed treatment.
Hospitals in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have been forced to take cost-cutting measures, including salary cuts. As of last week, only 260 of 1,260 regularly available medications were in stock in PA pharmacies or the Palestinian Health Ministry’s warehouses: Many of the suppliers could no longer afford to continue providing them on credit to their main customer, the Palestinian Health Ministry.
Due to Israel’s ongoing assault on the PA’s treasury, doctors and nurses, like all government employees, are receiving reduced wages, and even that irregularly. Some struggle to afford transportation, whose cost has risen due to the Israeli military’s culture of closing roads and erecting checkpoints, which also creates increasingly long waits.
In early May, the union of public-sector doctors in the West Bank declared a partial strike. That led to the closure of 477 public health clinics, while hospitals are providing only lifesaving treatments. Not many West Bank residents can afford to buy medicine or see doctors privately, especially since another measure adopted by Israel’s government – refusing to let roughly 170,000 Palestinians resume working in Israel – has accelerated the process of impoverishment.
Unsurprisingly, Finance Minister Benjamin Smotrich was one of the main people pushing for withholding the PA’s revenues and preventing Palestinian laborers from returning to Israel, and he has made no secret of this. On May 14, the website of the weekly Besheva published an approving article about the minister and his plans, stating: “The Palestinian Authority’s collapse will be brought about first and foremost by cutting it off from its financial oxygen line” (that is, its income from Palestinians’ own economic activity). But this effort to topple the PA is a slow-motion execution of the entire Palestinian health system.
The government must stop destroying the West Bank with its Palestinian residents inside. It must release immediately the revenues it is holding. And the international community must demand this by using the political tools at its disposal and stop making do with weak verbal condemnations.
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