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Pay for Slay

“Pay for slay” (also written “pay-to-slay”) is the popular English name for the Palestinian Authority’s policy of paying salaries to imprisoned terrorists and stipends to the families of dead attackers, administered through what the PA calls its “Martyrs’ Fund” (in Arabic, roughly rawatib al-asra wal-shuhada, “salaries of the prisoners and the martyrs”). The payments rise with the length of the sentence, so the deadlier or more prolonged the attack, the larger the lifetime reward: a direct financial incentive to murder built into law rather than an incidental welfare gesture.

Where the term comes from

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The phrase itself is a modern coinage, not an official Palestinian term. It was popularized in the mid-2010s by journalists and researchers, including NGO Monitor, tracking the payments after a string of stabbing and car-ramming attacks during the Second Intifada and its aftermath drew attention to how the Palestinian Authority, created by the 1993 Oslo Accords, funded prisoners it held up publicly as heroes. The underlying institution is much older: the PLO ran a martyrs’ welfare fund for fighters’ families going back to the 1960s, and after Oslo the PA folded prisoner salaries into its own budget and, in 2004, wrote the payments into law.

The mechanism

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Under the Palestinian Prisoners’ Law and its 2013 amendment, any Palestinian imprisoned by Israel for a security offense, regardless of the charge or the victim, qualifies for a monthly salary from the PA. The scale is explicit: a few years’ sentence draws a modest stipend, but sentences of 20 years or more, and life sentences typically imposed for the deadliest terror attacks, pay the highest tier, several times an average Palestinian civil servant’s wage. If the attacker is killed carrying out the act, rather than captured, the PA instead pays a lump sum and pension to the family. Jewish Virtual Library documents the PA spending on the order of 7% of its entire budget, hundreds of millions of dollars a year, on these payments even while soliciting foreign aid and international donor support.

The American response

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The policy prompted the United States’ Taylor Force Act, Public Law 115-141, signed in March 2018. It is named for Taylor Force, an American Army veteran and West Point graduate stabbed to death in Jaffa in March 2016 by a Palestinian assailant whose family then received PA payments tied directly to the killing. The law conditions certain categories of US aid to the PA on ending the payments, and it followed the 2018 Martin’s Rule/MERA framework strengthening US financial oversight of the practice.

The rebrand, and the objection it can’t answer

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Facing the aid cuts, the PA in 2022 announced it had folded the payments into its general social-welfare ministry and renamed the recipient category, presenting this as ending “pay for slay.” Independent monitors and Israeli officials documented that the same recipients kept receiving materially the same money under the new administrative label, a bookkeeping change rather than a policy change. PA officials and defenders frame the payments as prisoner and family welfare comparable to how any state supports veterans or war widows, not as a bounty system. The sliding scale answers that directly: welfare systems do not pay more for a longer sentence tied to a bigger body count. That structural feature, not the existence of any payment at all, is what critics and the law target.

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Sources

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