Dispute over whether to transfer funds deepens faultlines in Netanyahu coalition
Israel's prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu with defence minister Yoav Gallant at a press conference in Tel Aviv last week. Photograph: Abir Sultan/EPAUltranationalist finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said earlier this week that he had directed officials to halt the transfer of funds to the PA – which exercises limited autonomy in parts of the occupied West Bank – claiming it supported Hamas’s devastating attack on Israel last month.
The spat within the Israeli government comes as western and Arab diplomats have been discussing the need to bolster the PA, partly in the hopes that it would help contain unrest in the West Bank, but also to act as a counterweight to Hamas. Under the Oslo Accords – interim peace agreements signed between the Israelis and Palestinians in the 1990s – Israel collects various taxes on behalf of the Palestinians and transfers the funds each month to the PA. According to the PA finance ministry, the transfers in the first nine months of this year have averaged around Shk730 million per month.
“The Palestinian Authority is doing everything it can to keep security and stability in the West Bank,” Mr Blinken said. “It is vastly under-resourced. This is another aspect of the problem.”
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