BICOM

Prime Minister Muhammad Shtayyeh has warned that the Palestinian Authority (PA) could be bankrupt by August.

Speaking to the New York Times, Shtayyeh said the Palestinian Authority’s financial crisis, prompted by its refusal, for the third time, to accept any tax receipts from Israel is leading the PA to bankruptcy by July or August.

Shtayyeh added that the PA may ultimately be forced to make police officers redundant— a not-so-veiled threat to Israel, which depends on Palestinian security forces to police the West Bank. When the authority can no longer pay its bills, “we will start by sending our security people home,” he said.

Shtayyeh warned that if Israel pushes the PA to collapse, then “the PLO will run the show” — effectively rolling back the clock to before the Oslo peace process began. Even Palestinian recognition of Israel could be called into question if that happened, he said.

Shtayyeh also attacked as “blackmail” the Trump administration’s pressure tactics in pushing for a peace plan, beginning with the Bahrain conference later this month on economic development for the West Bank.

Leaked documents published yesterday revealed that in 2017 the PA cabinet secretly gave itself a 67 per cent pay rise. According to one document, the monthly salaries for cabinet ministers increased from $3,000 to $5,000, while the Prime Minister’s salary was increased to $6,000. The rises were made retroactively to 2014, when the cabinet took office, and were approved by PA President Mahmoud Abbas.

Ministers who live outside Ramallah also received $10,000 a year to rent a house there, another document showed. In addition, the PA inflated the exchange rate, giving them a 17 per cent premium when converting the salaries to Israeli shekels. The leaked documents sparked widespread outrage on Palestinian social media, forcing Shtayyeh to suspend the pay raises.