Palestinian Authority freezes financial support to PLO factions

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and other groups have said that the PLO had frozen the financial support allocations for the organisation’s member factions, Quds Press reported yesterday.

“The PLO’s National Fund told the PFLP that it had frozen its financial allocations for one month,” PFLP political bureau member Rabah Mohana said, claiming that President Mahmoud Abbas was doing this to prove his counterterrorism credentials to Israel and the US.

Mohana added: “Based on our experience with the late Yasser Arafat and the current Mahmoud Abbas, this suspension may last for more than one month and might be forever.”

He described this decision as “shameful” and reflective of the “authoritarianism” of the PLO leadership.

This decision came as a result of American and Israeli pressure [for Abbas] to stop supporting terror…[Anyone who] resists the occupation is a terrorist.

Badran Jaber, another PFLP leader, said that the discussions about freezing the salaries had been ongoing for months before it took place.

The discussions, Jaber said, were about American preconditions for the PA president’s visit to the United State. “This included cutting the salaries of the prisoners and families of the martyrs,” Jaber said.

Apart from operations against Israel, the left-wing PFLP has also drawn condemnation from around the Arab and Islamic world for supporting Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad in his war to crush the Syrian uprising against decades of authoritarian Ba’athist rule.