File this one under iconic international charities with long-blemished reputations behaving with even more baffling hypocrisy than usual. True, the shocking shenanigans at Unrwa, the so-called relief agency that has been found to have Hamas terrorists on the payroll, take up much room in that expanding brief. All the while, though, the Red Cross seems to have been lending a hand to convicted Palestinian Arab terrorists by helping them stuff their pockets with wads of misbegotten cash that could fuel more terrorism.
How that happens is less mysterious than why. As a prominent non-governmental organization, the International Committee of the Red Cross has until recently routinely been accorded permission to pay visits to imprisoned Palestinian terrorists. That the stipends received by prisoners, some of whom are serving sentences for murder, come courtesy of the Palestinian Authority is well documented. Less known is the manner in which they are actually processed.
According to Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli NGO, after prisoners fill out forms to receive the stipends, the Red Cross is the body that ensures the paperwork is delivered to Ramallah. The PMW’s director, Itamar Marcus, faults the Red Cross for this apparent anomaly but also, to a degree, the Israeli authorities.
“Israeli security is not looking at the forms or preventing the terrorist prisoner access to the forms they need to sign,” he stated in December, adding that the ICRC is involved “because as they visit prisoners, they’re able to bring in forms.”
The Red Cross denies that. A spokesman for the Red Cross at its Geneva, Switzerland, headquarters tells the Sun that “the ICRC does not provide any document called a stipend application.” The spokesman said that “the ICRC provides documents called Attestations of Detention,” adding that “the ICRC is not involved in any stipend payment program involving the Palestinian Authority.”
Such facile denials belie the existence of a shadowy stipend payout system to miscreants that is essentially cloaked in a web of fine print. According to PMW, a Fatah directive dated December 4 instructed prisoners to “please produce a [Red] Cross document for those who have no sentence whose names appear below; a [Red] Cross document accompanied by a new administrative [detention] order for the administrative detainees; and a [Red] Cross document accompanied by a verdict for the sentenced prisoners.”
Notably, lists of prisoners were circulated on social media so as to encourage prisoners and their families to claim the payouts. The Israeli government has argued that these stipends incentivize terrorism, hence their description as a particularly pernicious form of so-called pay for slay.
In 2018, Israel passed a law that penalized the Palestinian Authority for paying stipends to Palestinian terrorists and their families by ordering that Israel withhold the monthly transfers of tax revenues that it collects on the PA’s behalf. The Red Cross, though, by dint of its NGO status, has facilitated payments nonetheless, making them in effect an economic incentive for terrorist activity.
A spokesman for Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has called the Red Cross “a very problematic organization.” The ministry oversees the Israel Prison Service.
The complicity of the Red Cross in a toxic financial tangle is now coming into sharper focus. In a report issued in early March, the PMW published the translated text of the Palestinian Authority’s relevant regulatory framework that appears to have greased the wheels of the payments.
One PA law states, “The [prisoner’s] authorization of a representative is executed through a power of attorney issued by the Red Cross signed by the prisoner. … The document will be valid only at the Ministry for the purpose of paying the [prisoners’] salaries.”
In addition, “the [Red Cross supplies the] document that we established in our [PA prisoners’ law] regulations as a main document” to confirm salary eligibility.
Are any of those documents interchangeable with what the ICRC calls its “Attestations of Detention”? If so, nobody’s admitting it. The ICRC spokesman would only tell the Sun that he could “neither confirm nor deny what regulations the Palestinian Authority have.”
In any case, according to PMW, “the prisoners who are entitled to a monthly salary from the PA are those who have been imprisoned for acts of terrorism, as specified in the ‘PA Law of Prisoners and Released Prisoners number 19 of 2004.’”
In November, the Israeli government suspended all so-called humanitarian visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross to Palestinian Arab prisoners, both in Judea and Samaria and in the Gaza Strip.
For Mr. Marcus, that is a start but it might not be enough. “The Israeli government, which has suspended Red Cross visits to imprisoned terrorists, must notify the Red Cross that any future visits are contingent on the Red Cross’ commitment not to supply any forms to the PA that will enable terrorists to receive the terror salaries,” he states.
According to some reports, the Red Cross has quietly been pushing for the resumption of prison visits. A spokesman refused to answer a question about whether such visits to terrorists are going on right now. The ICRC is headquartered in Switzerland, a country as noted for the opacity of the financial dealings that transpire there as it is for its Alpine peaks and smooth chocolate.
As an organization that trades in large part on its brand recognition, the Red Cross’s many donors include American Airlines and Walmart. Yet it has come under fire recently for its unavailing efforts to secure the release of Israeli hostages still being held by Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip. Without more elucidation about these highly suspect prisoner payouts, the scrutiny is only likely to intensify.
