The Palestinian Authority continued to pay stipends to terrorists even after it said it would reform, according to a new U.S. State Department report.

The report, compiled between August 2025 and January 2026, is the first time the U.S. government has confirmed that the P.A. “provided payments to convicted terrorists released from Israeli prisons in October 2025 under President Trump’s 20-point peace plan.”

A copy of the State Department’s non-public report was obtained and first reported on by the Washington Free Beacon.

“The State Department report comes about six months after the beginning of President Donald Trump’s Gaza ceasefire, which included a commitment from Abbas that the P.A. would undertake a series of reforms, including ending pay-to-slay. The notice to Congress demonstrates that he and his government have not followed through in any meaningful way,” the Free Beacon reported, referring to P.A. leader Mahmoud Abbas.

On Sept. 29, 2025, Trump unveiled a 20-point “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict.”

According to Point 9 of the plan, a transitional body will govern the Gaza Strip until “such time as the Palestinian Authority has completed its reform program, as outlined in various proposals,” among them Trump’s 2020 peace plan.

In that plan, the P.A. was expected to stop payments to terrorists, cease incitement and propaganda in its educational system, and end its “political and judicial warfare against the State of Israel,” among other positive steps.

(The State Department report also found that the P.A. continued to incite and glorify violence and support terrorism in its “educational materials and summer camps.”)

On Feb. 10, 2025, the P.A. claimed it had given up its so-called pay-for-slay program.

The P.A. said payments would no longer be made through its Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, but instead through a new body, the Palestinian National Economic Empowerment Institution (PNEEI), under the P.A. Ministry of Social Development.

The P.A. argued it had stopped pay-for-slay because Palestinian prisoners would not receive money as a reward for acts of terror but solely based on their socioeconomic status.

In April 2025, the P.A. formally invited the Trump administration to verify its reforms.

Already in January, the State Department determined that the P.A. shifted to the new system to hide its terror payments from international donors as it positioned for a role in postwar Gaza.

That report, also obtained by the Free Beacon, found that the P.A. paid more than $200 million to terrorists and their families in 2025.

There has been ample evidence that the P.A. has made no efforts at real reform of its pay-for-slay program, which is continually monitored by Israel-based watchdog group Palestinian Media Watch (PMW).

In January, PMW discovered that Palestinian families living abroad had received their full payments from the “Martyr’s Fund,” the P.A.’s term for pay-for-slay.

The P.A. felt confident that the United States and European Union couldn’t monitor money transfers as easily abroad as it could within P.A.-controlled territory, Itamar Marcus, founder and director of Palestinian Media Watch, told JNS at the time.

Each month, it sent money to its Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) “embassies” around the world, which appeared in the budget as a vague line item marked “PLO orgs.”

That money was then transferred to local Commission of Detainees’ offices in places like Jordan, which continue to function despite the P.A.’s “reform,” and where there are large numbers of former terrorist families, Marcus said.

A major motivation driving the P.A.’s pretended reform is fear of liability, Lt. Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch, director of the Initiative for Palestinian Authority Accountability and Reform in the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, told JNS at the time the P.A. first announced it was stopping pay-for-slay.

“They don’t want to be exposed to lawsuits in the States,” he said, noting that laws in both Israel and the U.S. have make it easier to sue sponsors of terrorism.