Palestinian Authority's covert funding makes assessing US aid cuts tricky
The Palestinian Authority’s (PA) security forces have been hit by the Trump administration’s foreign funding freeze, but the funds suspended are just a slice of the cash they receive from the US, making it difficult to determine the status of the PA’s coffers.
The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the US stopped all security assistance to the PA. The Trump administration instituted a 90-day pause on foreign assistance. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio exempted only two entities from the cut: Israel and Egypt.
The security assistance that has been suspended to the PA is from the State Department and Department of Defence funds appropriated through the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), a source briefed by PA officials told MEE.
That funding shows up in unlikely places. For example, Palestinian security forces have been blocked from travelling to Jordan for SWAT training and advanced police courses, a US official told MEE.
“Most of the PA’s aid doesn’t come from the State Department. It comes from the CIA. Last I heard, they haven’t changed their policy on the PA,” a member of Fatah told MEE.
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Tahani Mustafa, the International Crisis Group's senior Palestine analyst, told MEE it can be difficult to tally just how many American dollars are flowing to the PA’s security services because they are covertly funded by US intelligence, whose funding is likely not impacted by the aid freeze.
“State Department and Department of Defence funding are not the whole part of the PA security services funding,” Mustafa said.
“In fact, they are less than those that will have a critical impact on national security, that being funding from the CIA.”
Breakdown: PA funds
In 2016 and 2017, the PA received $40m in INL security assistance funding. That is a relatively small amount when put into the context of US dollars going to other programmes.
For example, the underfunded UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, received $150m in those two fiscal years. The PA received $75m in bilateral economic support in the 2020 fiscal year.
The US’s funding for the PA’s security forces was described to MEE by one former senior US official as “first and foremost a jobs programme”.
The PA has been asking the US for heavy military equipment, MEE reported recently, but the US provides mainly small arms.
The real value in US funding for the PA’s security services comes from paying for training they receive and salaries. The PA’s security forces are trained in the occupied West Bank in Jericho and also in Jordan, Mustafa said.
The Jericho base first opened in 1994, but US officials have limited access there.
The covert component of PA funding makes it difficult to determine just how much money the PA security forces are receiving. But it underscores an important reality as planning for Gaza’s post-war governance increases.
At its core, the important part of the US’s relationship with the PA is managed in the shadows by intelligence officers, not diplomats or generals. That is a legacy traced back to the Intifada years when Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat preferred dealing with CIA chief George Tenet.
The PA, however, is scrambling for every dollar it can get as it tries to convince the US it should take over the Gaza Strip. It has been in a courting game with the Trump administration for months.
In December, the PA launched a failed offensive on Palestinian resistance fighters in Jenin in the occupied West Bank, in an attempt to showcase that it had the capacity to rule the Gaza Strip. That offensive was a failure, Mustafa from the Crisis Group said. Israel eventually launched its own attack on the camp.
Last month, Hussein al-Sheikh, a senior Palestinian official who has been floated as a successor to octogenarian Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, told Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, that the PA was ready to “clash” with Hamas in Gaza to gain power.
But the PA’s West Bank elite face an uphill battle.
On Tuesday, MEE reported that Jordan and Egypt believed they had swayed Trump to back an Egyptian proposal for post-war Gaza governance.
A senior Egyptian diplomat told MEE that the plan would not require the West Bank’s PA to clash with Hamas because neither party would be in government. Instead, officials would be drawn from across Gaza who belonged to the PA before Hamas came to power in the Strip in 2007 following Palestinian legislative elections.
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