Close to 30 Palestinian terrorists receive benefits from Israel’s National Insurance Institute, according to intelligence information uncovered by lawmaker Yulia Malinovsky (Yisrael Beiteinu) and made public by the Israel Hayom daily on Monday afternoon.
Last month, Welfare and Social Affairs Minister Yoav Ben-Tzur confirmed that Jerusalem transfers 7.3 million shekels ($1.96 million) to 265 people in Gaza annually, mainly in disability payments for Palestinians who worked in Israel and paid their premiums.
While Ben-Tzur claimed at the time that the government did not have any information on the basis of which it could stop the payments, a document from the Defense Ministry’s National Headquarters for Combating Economic Terrorism paints a different picture.
According to the report, which was cross-checked against databases of the Israel Defense Forces’ Military Intelligence Directorate (known in Hebrew as AMAN), almost 30 known Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists in Gaza, Judea and Samaria receive benefits.
“The probe was carried out by cross-checking the identity documents of beneficiaries against the AMAN databases, which are based on several different sources; hence, the reliability is high,” the document reads.
“We are a self-destructing country,” Malinovsky told Israel Hayom on Monday. “What is worrying about the whole situation is that, while I was able to figure this out, there are many other things the government doesn’t tell us, or they didn’t even check for over eight months.
“The shocking notion that the tax money we all pay goes to Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists is simply incomprehensible,” she added.
On Oct. 7, Hamas and Islamic Jihad murdered some 1,200 people in southern Israel, in the deadliest antisemitic attack since the Holocaust. Thousands more were wounded and roughly 250 were abducted to Gaza. Terrorists committed rape, sexual abuse, torture, burning and desecration of corpses.