US Press
New York Times finds Israel's squeeze pushing the Authority toward insolvency
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
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The New York Times published on Tuesday a long report on the finances of the West Bank, and its conclusion is the one Palestinian bankers have been stating in Ramallah for a year: the Palestinian Authority is running out of money to be a government with.
The paper's accounting has four parts, and each is a decision taken in Israel.
Work permits are the first. Thousands of Palestinian labourers lost the permits that let them work in Israel after October 2023, and West Bank unemployment now stands at 28 percent, more than double what it was before the war.
Clearance revenue is the second. Israel collects import duties and taxes at the border on the Authority's behalf, and the Times reported that from May 2025 it has been confiscating hundreds of millions of shekels a month. That stream is roughly two-thirds of a 2026 budget the paper puts at $6 billion.
The cash that cannot leave the vaults#
The third is the one least understood outside Palestinian banking, and the Times set it out clearly. Israel permits Palestinian banks to move only about $1.5 billion a quarter into the Israeli banking system, far below what the economy generates, so shekel notes accumulate where they are deposited.
About $5.7 billion in physical cash now sits in West Bank vaults, unable to convert into anything a bank can lend or a business can wire.
They're preventing us from meeting the demand.
Bashar Yasin of the Banks Association, quoted by the New York Times
Yahya Shunnar of the Palestine Monetary Authority told the paper the system is approaching a full crisis.
What the arithmetic does to a household#
The fourth part is the salary bill, and the Times reported it through one man. Maj. Arafat Halabi, a traffic officer, has watched his pay cut roughly in half, to about $750 a month.
He is one of about 140,000 public employees on reduced salaries. Schools have shortened the week to three days. Health spending has been squeezed to the point of medicine shortages.
Prime Minister Mohammed Mustafa gave the paper the shortest summary of it. "Everyone has been affected," he said.
Why an American report matters here#
None of these facts is new to a reader in Nablus or Hebron, and Times of Palestine has reported the clearance deductions, the correspondent-banking waiver and the salary cuts through the year. What is new is where the account is now being made.
The Times is read in the offices that hold the two decisions capable of changing the picture — the waiver that lets Israeli banks clear Palestinian transactions at all, renewed at the finance minister's discretion, and the American position on whether withheld clearance revenue is released.
A report of this length in that paper, arriving in the same week that Washington's ambassador publicly called settler violence in Qusra terrorism, puts the economic file in front of the same American readers now watching the West Bank for other reasons. Whether that produces anything is a separate question. The Authority's cash position will not wait for the answer.
