PA denies plan to make 8,000 Gaza employees retire early

Palestinian Authority (PA) employees demonstrated in Gaza City against a PA decision to impose drastic salary cuts for its Gaza-based employees, on 8th April 2017. [Images and video by Mohammad Asad]

The Palestinian Authority has denied reports that it is planning to make 8,000 of its employees in Gaza take early retirement, sources at the Ministry of Finance have told Al-Watan Voice.

“We have not issued any statement about this,” the sources insisted. “All that has been published in this regard is propaganda and baseless claims.”

The statement was issued after several local media outlets mentioned a plan by the PA to make the move after completing a data review of all employees.

According to the media reports, most of those to be affected by the plan will come from the PA security services.

The PA’s denial is being treated with some scepticism because it has already forced thousands of members of its security and civil service employees in Gaza to take early retirement.

Such retirement, it was pointed out, means that the employees in question will continue to receive 50 per cent of their salary from the Ministry of Finance; they will not be registered with the Retirement Commission as pensioners.

Netanyahu: Annexation has started, PA and Jordan threats don’t matter

Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If the image(s) bear our credit, this license also applies to them. What does that mean? For other permissions, please contact us.