(JNS.org) The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Tuesday modified the proposed Taylor Force Act with new provisions that make it more difficult for the Palestinian Authority (PA) to receive U.S. aid while also paying salaries to terrorists and their families.

Citing a PA budget report, Palestinian Media Watch reported in July that the PA’s total annual expenditure on terror payments is $355 million this year.

The Taylor Force Act’s new provisions add stricter conditions on American and European aid to the PA, urging donor nations to “cease direct budgetary support until the Palestinian Authority stops all payments incentivizing terror.” 

The bill would cut off all U.S. aid to the PA until the State Department confirms that salary payments to convicted terrorists have ceased. The new provisions also obligate the PA to revoke “any law, decree, regulation, or document authorizing or implementing a system of compensation” to terrorists and their families.

The legislation is named after a U.S. Army veteran who was killed by a Palestinian terrorist in Jaffa last year.

In mid-June, a group of former Israeli security officials called “Commanders for Israel’s Security” (CIS) asserted that passing the Taylor Force Act would pose the risk of undermining the PA’s security cooperation with Israel. Soon after CIS issued its statement against the legislation, a group of 13 retired security officials responded in an op-ed for the The Jerusalem Post, writing that CIS is “fundamentally mistaken” in its opposition to U.S. efforts to punish the PA for incentivizing terrorism.

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