The Coalition for Accountability and Integrity (AMAN), an alliance created in 2000 by a group of civic associations that work in the field of democracy and human rights, published a report in 2018. It states that, for example, the PA invested 17.5 million dollars in the construction of a “presidential palace” of
4,700 square meters for Mahmoud Abbas. To undermine the criticism, Abbas decided to turn the palace into an enormous library.
Another example of the misuse of funds is seen in the payment of the expenses and salaries of a non-existent airline called Palestine Airlines (it doesn’t even have airplanes). “Hundreds of employees from this company continue to receive a salary and grants from the Palestinian Authority, even though the company is not registered according to the Palestinian law”, AMAN affirms. They are not the only ones that do not work and collect. According to the quoted report, the members of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) have been collecting monthly salaries even though the Parliament has been paralyzed for over a decade, as a consequence of the dispute between the Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah and Hamas. According to AMAN, the PA (2017) spent around 11 million dollars in a parliament that does not work. Half of the money was spent on salaries for these ghost deputies.
AMAN also detected an unjustified increase of high-rank officials among the Palestinians and the purchase of vehicles for them, their friends, and family members. It is worth pointing out that the Palestinian law allows those terrorists that have spent more than twenty years in an Israeli prison to have a free car. Palestinians urgently need more new schools and hospitals and not these
types of expenses. Palestinian corruption cannot be blamed on Israel and
it has been worryingly ignored by the international media.