Transparency & Accountability
Audits trace 2026 donor money only to Palestinian Authority salaries
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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The money donors have sent the Palestinian Authority this year can be followed as far as the payroll and no further. Every tranche disbursed in 2026 is documented on the giver's side, and the two largest channels, the European Union's PEGASE mechanism and the World Bank's trust funds, publish audited proof that their money paid vetted teachers, nurses and civil servants.
What the rest of the treasury spent, and on what, rests on ministry tables that the US State Department rated incomplete in August.
The scale is set by last year's ledger. The Israeli Institute for National Security Studies, in a July study of how the Authority survives, put foreign aid to the treasury at NIS 2.74 billion in 2025, up from NIS 2.52 billion in 2024 and NIS 755 million in 2023, while the tax revenue Israel collects on the Authority's behalf fell to NIS 6.16 billion.
Ministry of Finance data reported by Sada News on 7 December 2025 broke the first ten months of last year down by donor. External support to the end of October reached NIS 2.016 billion, about $615 million, of which NIS 1.626 billion was budget support.
The EU's PEGASE mechanism led with NIS 795.3 million, followed by the World Bank with NIS 631.3 million, Saudi Arabia with NIS 101.3 million, Norway with NIS 67.6 million and France with NIS 31.3 million. Saudi Arabia's $90 million tranche for 2025 arrived on 1 December, after that count.
Finance and Planning Minister Estephan Salameh gave Al Jazeera a rounder figure in January, about $850 million received in 2025, and said the 2026 budget assumes $800 million in external support. On 12 February, the Wafa news agency reported him saying the emergency mechanism donors approved the year before had produced $250 million of the $1.2 billion expected.
He called 2026 the hardest year in the Authority's financial history, with outside support uncertain until at least June.
What arrived this year#
The 2026 disbursements that donors have announced are listed below in the currency each donor used. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and the Palestine Monetary Authority, in preliminary balance-of-payments figures published on 29 June, recorded current transfers from abroad to the government sector at $462 million in the first quarter alone.
That is a balance-of-payments measure of all official transfers to government, not the treasury's cash count, and the two are not directly comparable.
| Donor | Announced | Amount | Stated use |
|---|---|---|---|
| European Commission | 2026–27 commitment, confirmed 13 July | €310 million through PEGASE | Salaries and pensions, social allowances, East Jerusalem hospital referrals |
| EU with 11 European states | 13 July, Brussels | €41.7 million in new agreements | PEGASE; Spain, Denmark, Cyprus, Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Belgium |
| Norway | 20 April | NOK 100 million | Budget support for public services, salaries, education |
| Japan | 11 May | About $12 million | World Bank Palestinian Fund for Reconstruction and Development; fiscal stability and health |
| Australia | 21 July | A$10 million | Same fund; public financial management (a further A$15 million went to the UN Horizon Fund, not the Authority) |
| World Bank | Approved 3 October 2025, disbursing since | $103.3 million | Fourth top-up of the emergency facility; retroactive salaries in education and health |
The World Bank says it has mobilised about $590 million since the war began to help the Authority manage its fiscal crisis and keep education and health services running in the West Bank, including $28.8 million from Britain, France and Japan through the reconstruction fund.
Its fourth top-up, $95 million from the Bank's own trust fund and $8.3 million from that donor fund, was approved on 3 October 2025 with every dollar assigned to retroactive salary payments for eligible education and health employees.
What the audits can and cannot show#
The EU describes PEGASE as a mechanism with ex-ante audit and ex-post verification of every payment, under independent contractors and annual financial audits. Every individual recipient of EU funds, whether a civil servant, a pensioner or the head of a household on the cash transfer programme, is screened through tools that scan more than 1,500 sanctions lists, according to the Commission's own description.
Its 2025–27 programme, worth up to €1.6 billion, ties most disbursements to the reform matrix agreed with the Authority in November 2024.
The World Bank's emergency facility carries the same kind of trail. An audit firm was contracted to verify the payroll the Bank pays, and its implementation report of April 2026 records clean audit opinions issued on 6 August 2025 and 30 March 2026. Wafa, reporting Japan's contribution in May, noted that education and health together account for about 60 percent of the Authority's wage bill.
Those are the limits of the evidence. The audits prove that donor money reached named public employees in two sectors. They say nothing about the domestic revenue the treasury spent alongside it.
The ministry's monthly execution tables, which the State Department confirms the Authority publishes, are the record that would show how each shekel of the 2026 budget was allocated. Times of Palestine has not seen a 2026 donor-by-donor tally from the ministry.
What the treasury did with the money#
Public employees have not seen a full salary in more than a year. The ministry paid October 2025 salaries at no less than 60 percent with a NIS 2,000 floor, February 2026 salaries at 50 percent in May, and May salaries on 23 August at no less than 50 percent, a three-month lag on half pay, according to its own announcements carried by Wafa.
Asked by Voice of Palestine radio about the next payment, Salameh said it was too early to talk about figures or percentages, and that the aim was a minimum that helps employees endure.
The monthly salary bill stands at nearly NIS 1.05 billion; the year's budget support covers about one salary and 60 percent of another.
Sada News, on Ministry of Finance data to October 2025
The arrears are the other side of that arithmetic. The World Bank's review of July to September 2025 recorded arrears to public employees of $2.5 billion and to the private sector of $1.65 billion. Al Jazeera reported in December that total public debt had reached $14.6 billion, including $3.4 billion owed to Palestinian banks and $3.8 billion in unpaid pension contributions.
The 2026 budget was written as an emergency measure. The cabinet adopted it on 17 March and President Mahmoud Abbas issued it as Decree-Law No. 7 of 2026 on 31 March, Wafa reported.
Anadolu Agency reported revenues projected at NIS 15.7 billion against spending of NIS 17.6 billion, 5.8 percent below 2025, with a hiring freeze, a NIS 120 million cut in the 2025 wage bill, and cash directed first to health, education, security and social protection.
No legislature examined it; the Legislative Council has not sat since 2007 and was dissolved in 2018.
Part of the Authority's spending happens in Israel's books. Middle East Monitor reported on 27 April that Israel collected more than NIS 740 million in clearance revenue that month, deducted about NIS 590 million against the Authority's debts to the Israel Electric Corporation, water utilities and environmental bodies, and froze the rest.
Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa has said not a single shekel of tax revenue was transferred in the past year.
The line that donors and Washington dispute#
One expenditure remains contested in every direction. The Authority moved payments to prisoners and the families of the dead and wounded to the Palestinian National Economic Empowerment Institution, known as Tamkeen, and says stipends are now paid on economic need alone. It commissioned Alvarez & Marsal to audit the new system and released a summary in July under US pressure.
The summary, as reported by The Times of Israel and analysed by the Israel Policy Forum on 27 July, found the new programme substantially separated from the old mechanism and based on financial circumstances. It also flagged at least NIS 320 million paid under the old system between the February 2025 decree and the first Tamkeen payment in December 2025.
The auditors did not review the March and June 2026 tranches, the summary noted, and they did not receive full access to certain information.
The State Department told Congress in April that the Authority paid more than $200 million to prisoners and families in 2025 and continued payments through changed mechanisms. On 11 July a spokesperson called on the Authority to release the full audit, saying it appeared to cover only the new welfare programme.
Israel's cabinet was told, according to a Jerusalem Post report relayed by Sada News, that the Authority paid NIS 395 million to prisoners and NIS 92 million to families in 2025. Israel deducts the equivalent from clearance revenue under its 2018 law.
Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli monitoring group, alleged in a report carried by the Washington Free Beacon that the Authority will pay $315 million in 2026 through security, civil service and pension payrolls. Times of Palestine has not verified that claim.
Tamkeen says it is the only body empowered to determine such entitlements and that it complies with the February 2025 decree, and a Palestinian official quoted by Al-Quds called the accusations part of an Israeli campaign to weaken the Authority. The EU's published safeguards describe sanctions-list screening and payment audits; Times of Palestine found no published EU finding on the payroll allegation.
The oversight record#
The State Department's 2026 Fiscal Transparency Report, released in August, found that the Authority did not meet the minimum requirements and made no significant progress. The enacted budget was public only inside the West Bank, late, incomplete and unapproved by a legislature, and debt information, including for state-owned enterprises, was incomplete.
The supreme audit institution lacked full independence, the report said, with its reports neither published in reasonable time nor covering the whole executed budget. The report credited the monthly execution reports and audit reports the Authority does publish.
The State Audit and Administrative Control Bureau delivered its 2025 annual report to Mustafa in July, presented by its head, Amal Faraj. Raya reported that the bureau issued 90 audit reports during the year and 37 follow-up reports, received 290 complaints, and recorded a 52 percent response rate to its recommendations.
Mustafa said the government follows the bureau's reports systematically with the competent bodies and treats their recommendations as part of its reform agenda.
The Coalition for Accountability and Integrity, AMAN, found in its eighteenth annual report that only ten of 42 public institutions published annual reports for 2025 and that weak accountability, with power concentrated in the presidency, remains the main driver of corruption risk. After the Brussels donor meeting on 13 July, Salameh told Raya that most participants praised the government's reform measures.
The records that would close the gap exist in principle. The ministry's 2026 monthly tables by donor and by spending line, the audit bureau's findings on donor-financed items, and the full Alvarez & Marsal report would together show where the year's money went. Until they are public, the verified answer is payroll, at half pay, for two sectors.
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