Israel has stolen $4.8 billion from the Palestinian Authority

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The PA is up to its neck in debts. Credit: AP

By Amira Hass, Reposted from Haaretz, May 7, 2026

Israel steals hundreds of millions of shekels each month from the Palestinian Authority. These are the customs on imported goods destined for Palestinians that pass through Israeli ports, and the taxes and tariffs on fuel, cigarettes, and cement that Israel sells to the Palestinians. Instead of transferring these revenues to PA treasury officials as it is required to do, it deposits the funds into some Israeli account.

The stolen funds have already reached approximately 14 billion shekels ($4.8 billion). This is small change for the high-tech nation that with one smart bomb, destroys in seconds what the Lebanese, Iranians, and Palestinians have built over hundreds of years. And thank God, Israel has many bombs.

But the money is crucial for realizing our goal of absolute and exclusive Jewish rule between the river and the sea, regardless of whether the prime minister is Benjamin Netanyahu or Naftali Bennett. The sum will not necessarily enrich Israel, but withholding it impoverishes both Palestinian families and the entire Palestinian society. The PA is up to its neck in debts to banks and goods and service providers, and to its public sector employees. Unlike in the past, this time agriculture and labor in Israel cannot save the Palestinian economy; these too are forbidden, or almost forbidden, by Israeli directive.

A market in downtown Ramallah. Israel is strangling the economy. Credit: artaxerxes_longhand / Shutterstock

The theft of Palestinian money is one of Israel’s oldest professions and over the years it has taken on various forms. In this case it is widespread, organized, and overt looting on an official level, with a large bounty that grows larger each month. The thieves wear no masks, they do not fire a single shot, and they do not need to crack the code for the safe. They already have the safe, and they can reach in and take what is inside at their will. The bounty is the Palestinian government’s revenue, from which teachers and doctors and maintenance workers are paid, medicines are bought, and schools are built, and yes, the salaries of Palestinian security forces personnel are also paid.

These are the same forces Israeli military officials praise for their role in ensuring quiet in the West Bank despite daily military raids, some of them deadly, despite daily attacks by armed Jewish civilians and despite increasing poverty and unemployment.

Israel has gone about the business of plundering PA revenues in three stages. These stages illustrate the progress of the judicial overhaul, as decisions on the issue have become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a single entity, without input from the Knesset or the courts.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. Credit: Oren Ben Hakoon

The person who first drew my attention to this is economist Muayyad Afaneh, an adviser to the Palestinian Finance Ministry, who has long been warning about the severity of the situation. In the first stage, in 2018, it was the Knesset that passed a law to confiscate funds amounting approximately to the salaries and allowances the PA grants to Palestinian prisoners, former prisoners and their families, and to the families of those killed, which are increasing daily. There was a debate, the outcome of which was obvious in advance, but there was at least the appearance of a process respecting the separation of powers. The law was implemented starting in 2019.

In October 2023, the cabinet decided to seize PA revenues equivalent to the amount it allocates to the Gaza Strip. For the most part, these are allowances intended for families who are traditionally opposed to Hamas; that is, for Palestinian Authority public sector employees, mostly Fatah loyalists, who, by order of Mahmoud Abbas, ceased working from 2007 until their retirement. The sum also includes payment for medical treatments for Gaza Strip residents abroad and in the West Bank, and payment for approximately 15 million cubic meters of drinking water, which Israel supplies to Gaza after it faced international criticism for shutting off the tap at the beginning of the war.

This amount of water cannot meet the population’s needs, nor is it known how much of it actually reaches water distribution stations because the pipelines are damaged, and tanks continue to destroy the infrastructure. But what is important here is that the Palestinian Authority pays Israel for the water.

Settlers attack Palestinian farmers, journalists and foreign activists in Beita near Nablus in November 2025. Credit: Nedal Eshtayah/Anadolu via Reuters Connect

And in May 2026, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich decided, on his own authority, that whatever remains in the coffers – after all seizures and deductions for services Israel sells to Palestinians – would also be seized. All this as punishment for the Palestinian Authority appealing to international institutions demanding that the genocide be stopped and that Israel respect the law. These three stages indicate that there is no ceiling to the drive for collective revenge.

The organized and systematic robbery of Palestinian revenue is akin to the God-fearing settler terror. Both are part of the economic and psychological war of attrition Israel is waging against Palestinians and their leadership. All this is in addition to the war of annihilation, which uses bombs, torture, and starvation in prisons.

The attrition has its official, governmental arm and its quasi-pirate arm – the terror army of the settlement enterprise. Both have the same goal. The official arm justifies its actions with the rule of law and the fight against Palestinian resistance to the occupation. The quasi-pirate arm speaks openly and freely about expelling Palestinians from the country – that Phase B of the finance minister’s decisive plan, which he refers to with the euphemism “voluntary migration.”

Amira Hass is the Haaretz correspondent for the Occupied Territories. Born in Jerusalem in 1956, Hass joined Haaretz in 1989, and has been in her current position since 1993. As the correspondent for the territories, she spent three years living in Gaza, which served of the basis for her widely acclaimed book, “Drinking the Sea at Gaza.” She has lived in the West Bank city of Ramallah since 1997.

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