For the fourth straight year, 600,000 Palestinian children attend school part-time because the PA says it cannot afford full teacher salaries. A watchdog estimates the PA will pay terrorists and their families $315 million this year.
The Palestinian Authority paid more than $200 million to terrorists and their families in 2025, according to a US State Department report to Congress, even as it kept its government schools in Judea and Samaria open only part of the week for a third straight year because it says it cannot afford to pay its teachers. The shortened schedule continues into a fourth year this fall for more than 600,000 students, while Palestinian Media Watch estimates the PA will pay $315 million to terrorists and their families in 2026.
Mahdi Daraghmeh’s three children, ages 6, 8 and 13, are among those students. Their school in the Jordan Valley town of al-Malih is open three days a week, and the rest of the time, Daraghmeh told The Times of Israel, the children stay home on their phones playing games and forget what they learned.
Half a salary, half a school week
More than 40,000 teachers work in the PA’s government schools. For five years, the PA has paid its public employees only part of their salaries, often months late. In September, the Palestinian Finance Ministry announced that employees would finally be paid for June, at 50 percent of their salary or NIS 2,000, whichever was higher. One principal told The Times of Israel he has received half his pay, around NIS 2,800 ($911) a month, for three years.
In 2023, the PA allowed public employees to work just two days a week, and schools cut back to two or three days. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel reports that class time for Arabic language alone has fallen by nearly two-thirds. A Ramallah teacher told the group that her daughter finished first grade without knowing her letters in Arabic or English. Test results published in September by the OECD showed math and science proficiency among Palestinian 15-year-olds falling since 2022, with scores among the lowest in the world.
The approximately 46,000 students in UNRWA schools and more than 160,000 in private schools are largely unaffected. Private schools charge several thousand shekels a year and keep paying their teachers.
Saad Erekat, head of the Palestinian Teachers’ Union, tied the return to full schooling to the restoration of full salaries: “I want a full salary and full schooling.” He said the union proposed that teachers alone receive full pay, and the PA rejected the idea on the grounds that it could not favor one group of public employees over another.
The payments that continued
The Times of Israel report attributes the crisis to Israel withholding tax revenues it collects for the PA, which Mahmoud Abbas says have reached $6 billion. The article makes no mention of the PA’s payments to terrorists, which are the reason Israel began withholding much of that money. Under a 2018 Israeli law, Israel deducts from the PA’s tax revenues an amount equal to what the PA pays terrorists and their families.
Under the PA’s program, imprisoned terrorists receive a monthly salary that rises with the length of their sentence, from NIS 1,400 up to NIS 12,000, according to Lt.-Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs. A terrorist serving a long sentence can earn more than four times what the half-paid principal now takes home. Hirsch calculated that the PA’s terror payments totaled more than a billion dollars between 2018 and 2023.
On February 10, 2025, under Western pressure, Abbas announced the end of the program, saying payments would move to a new body, the Palestinian National Economic Empowerment Institution, and be based on financial need. The State Department report, first obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, found the payments continued, including to convicted terrorists released from Israeli prisons in October 2025 under President Trump’s 20-point plan. The report also found that the PA continued to glorify violence in its educational materials and summer camps.
The payments violate an American law written specifically to stop them. The Taylor Force Act, signed by President Trump in March 2018, is named for Taylor Force, a 28-year-old US Army veteran and Vanderbilt University graduate student who was stabbed to death by a Palestinian terrorist in Jaffa in 2016. The law bars US economic aid that directly benefits the PA as long as it keeps paying terrorists and their families, and requires the State Department to report to Congress each year. The State Department’s April 2026 report concluded that the PA “continues to provide a system of compensation in support of terrorism through new mechanisms and under a different name.”
The law has a gap. It blocks only one category of aid, the Economic Support Fund, and leaves untouched the money Washington sends for the PA’s security forces. According to an analysis by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, the US continued to provide the PA with tens of millions of dollars a year through that channel, covering routine operations, maintenance, vehicles, and equipment for PA security units. The Jerusalem Center found that some of the PA security personnel trained with that funding were terrorists. Money is fungible: every dollar Washington spends running the PA’s security forces is a dollar the PA no longer has to spend on them, freeing its own budget for other priorities. Those priorities, by the State Department’s own findings, still include paying terrorists.
Palestinian Media Watch reports that the PA has hidden its 2026 payments by disguising at least 23,500 recipients as civil servants, security personnel, and pensioners. In February, the group reported that the PA reclassified another 6,000 recipients as pensioners. PA Finance Minister Estephan Salameh responded to the exposure by affirming that the payments would continue despite the PA’s financial distress.
The figures make the choice concrete. The principal interviewed by The Times of Israel is missing about $911 a month, half his salary. If PMW’s estimate is accurate, the $315 million the PA plans to pay terrorists this year would cover that missing half-salary for roughly 28,000 teachers for a full year.
The PA told the teachers’ union it could not prioritize teachers over other employees. By the US government’s own findings, it has continued to prioritize the people sitting in Israeli prisons for attacks on Israelis.
Western governments still describe the Palestinian Authority (PA) as the foundation of a future Palestinian state. What they envision is an unprecedented state within Israel’s borders: militarized, ethnically cleansed of Jews, with an exclusively Muslim capital in Jerusalem centered on Judaism’s holiest site, the Temple Mount. The State Department found that the same government cutting its children’s school week is still funding terror and teaching violence in the classrooms that remain open.
The breath of schoolchildren
The Talmud records a teaching from Resh Lakish in the name of Rabbi Yehuda Nesia: the world endures only because of the breath of tinokot shel beit rabban, the children who sit and learn Bible from their teacher (Shabbat 119b). The Sage Rav Pappa asked his teacher Abaye whether the Torah study of grown scholars like themselves counted for the same. Abaye answered that breath tainted by sin cannot compare to breath free of sin. The innocent voices of children reciting their lessons, the Sages taught, carry a power that the learning of adults cannot match.
The Talmud draws practical laws from that teaching. Schoolchildren may not be pulled from their studies even to build the Holy Temple, and a town without schoolchildren will be destroyed. The Psalmist expressed the same idea:
“Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast Thou founded strength, because of Thine adversaries; that Thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.” (Psalms 8:3)
The verse places the source of a nation’s strength in the mouths of its children, and names that strength as the answer to the enemy and the avenger.
The Palestinian Authority has inverted that order. The Sages held that not even the construction of God’s house may interrupt a child’s lesson. The PA has cut the lessons of 600,000 children in half for four years, citing a lack of funds, while, by the US State Department’s findings, it paid more than $200 million in a single year to terrorists and the families of terrorists. The money that could have kept the classrooms open went to the people the Psalmist called the enemy and the avenger.
