Lebanese President Joseph Aoun meets with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas at the presidential palace in Baabda, Lebanon, May 21, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir

It is more important to the Palestinian Authority (PA) to provide terrorists with millions of dollars in rewards than to provide Palestinian children with an education, admits a senior PA education official.

The official confirmed what Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) has long been reporting — that the PA prioritizes terrorists over its children’s education.

In an interview on PA television, the official declared that teachers refrain from working full-time because they are not paid their full salaries by the PA.

The teachers are not paid in full because Israel freezes the tax money that it collects for the PA as long as the PA financially rewards terror. This is known as Israel’s Anti Pay-for-Slay Law, which she called “theft of funds” by Israel.

What the official did not mention is that if the PA would not prioritize terror payments, there would be no Israeli deductions, and teachers would work full-time.

Official PA TV host: “Dr. [Suhair Qassem], tell us more details about the obstacles facing the [education] system or the educational training programs.” …

PA National Institute for Educational Training Director-General Dr. Suhair Qassem: “If we talk about the reason why we are reducing the [teachers’] work hours, why the teacher refrains from working, the reason for this is the theft of funds [i.e., Israel’s freeze of PA taxes used for Pay-for-Slay].”

[Official PA TV, Educational Podcast, Oct. 15, 2025]

The PA teachers’ union had announced two months ago that if the PA did not pay the teachers their full salaries, they would only work three or four days a week. The PA has only paid 70% of the salaries of its employees, which include these teachers, since the start of the school year.

Therefore, teachers have not been working full time, and the children are only receiving a part-time education.

PMW has explained that were the PA to stop its “Pay-for-Slay” terror-rewards program, the PA’s entire financial crisis would be resolved and its employees would all be able to regularly receive their salaries in full.

The PA runs its Pay-for-Slay program with full knowledge that it will not have money left to pay its teachers. These terror salaries come to a tune of 30 million USD a month.

Earlier this year, PMW exposed that the PA was lying about having changed its system to become need-based and that families of prisoners and Martyrs continued to receive terror payments as they have in the past.

The PA’s financial crisis is self-inflicted — the result of its “terrorists first” ideology institutionalized from the very top by Mahmoud Abbas, who has repeated again and again that “even if we have [only] one penny left, it is for the prisoners and Martyrs.”