Director of the Government Communication Center, Muhammad Abu al-Rub, said that the occupation’s freezing of hundreds of millions of our people’s funds, which are being held in order to pay them as compensation to Israeli families, under the pretext that the official Palestinian institution pays the allowances of the families of martyrs and prisoners, is a new attempt to expand the circle of targeting the institutions of the State of Palestine, and to push it to stop fulfilling its obligations towards its people from various categories.

Abu al-Rub confirmed to WAFA news agency on Tuesday evening, in response to the decision of the Central Court of the Occupation to freeze 410 million shekels of Palestinian funds, that the official Palestinian position is clear in rejecting Israeli blackmail, adding that there are official moves on two levels: the first is the continuation of recruiting international pressure to release our withheld funds with the help of various friendly countries and international institutions, and there is an escalation in international pressure on the occupation to release these funds, and secondly, the Palestinian legal efforts being made to challenge these illegal decisions.

He said that the Israeli occupation is waging a comprehensive war on the ground and a stifling financial siege, as it deliberately deducts more than half of the monthly clearance value, which is the main resource for public finances, so that the total of our withheld funds reaches about 7.5 billion shekels, distributed as follows: More than 3 billion shekels are government allocations for our people in the Gaza Strip, specifically the salaries of doctors, teachers, relief crews and various categories of employees, which are paid by the public finances twice, once by rejecting Israeli blackmail and the government’s transfer of the Gaza Strip’s allocations, and another time by the occupation’s deduction of the same amount that is transferred to the Strip from the clearance funds, in addition to withholding more than 3.5 billion shekels of our funds under the pretext of the Palestinian Authority paying the allocations for the families of martyrs and prisoners, in addition to about one billion shekels, which is the Palestinian finances’ share of the departure tax on the crossings, which Israel has been withholding for several years.