Hamas to learn the price of being a begger entity

Scotsman:

ISRAEL could plunge the Palestinian Authority into a financial crisis by withholding its main source of income, following the election victory by the militant group Hamas, Israeli officials warned yesterday.

Israel, which called on the international community to boycott a Hamas-led government, transfers about £28 million every month of customs duties and VAT to the authority, which covers the salaries of a majority of its 130,000 employees.

But the Israeli finance ministry director-general, Yossi Bachar, said that Israel may now face "practical problems" in passing on the money because of Hamas's stated aim of overthrowing the state of Israel and its track record of terrorism. The first payment is due next week.

The financial cost of Hamas's landslide victory in Palestinian parliamentary elections on Wednesday is likely to become even worse, with a senior United States diplomat yesterday warning that America would have to freeze millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA) if a Hamas-led government refuses to renounce terror.

The US gave the PA more than £220 million in direct aid last year and several million more through various UN charities. Without Western aid, the bankrupt Palestinian Authority, which had a £565 million operating deficit last year, would almost certainly collapse.

...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more