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Four days before an economic conference on the Middle East is due to open at Palma de Majorca, Germany announced today it is transferring to the Palestinian Authority the sum of 250 million Deutschmarks.
This in spite of the fact that when Israeli forces on Oct. 22 burst into the Ramallah headquarters of Yasser Arafat’s presidential guard, known as Force 17, they found an extraordinary set of documents containing evidence the Palestinian leader was paying the entire body of Tanzim-Fatah terrorists out of his own “presidential” budget, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly, the Middle East-based intelligence news service.
Every one of the 10,000 Tanzim activists was taking home 875 New Israeli Shekels – and had been ever since the Palestinian leader launched his armed confrontation against Israel last year. The Ramallah raid was carried out as part of a comprehensive punitive operation for the assassination of Israel’s tourism minister Rehavam Zeevi Oct. 17, DEBKA reports.
The captured documents included Arafat’s signed directive, issued three weeks before the outbreak of the intifada, to pay $22,000 each into the personal account of each of the leading Fatah terror masters to defray the costs of creating the terror body named the Tanzim. A corps of Palestinians was to be recruited who were prepared to engage in bombing, shooting, lynching and any other form of terror against Israel that was ordered by their masters. The recipients of these funds were the Tanzim commander Marwan Barghouti, Kemal Hamad, Ahmed Abayat (whom Israeli forces killed this month), Issam Abu Bakr and other Arafat associates.
The documents showed exactly how Arafat’s office transfers the Tanzim payroll to the Ramallah offices of Force 17, whose paymasters distribute the wage packets. Arafat fills those wage packets from the subsidies awarded the Palestinian Authority by European Union member governments, including Germany, Belgium, France, UK and Italy, DEBKA’s sources say.
A simple reckoning shows that, in the last 14 months, the European taxpayer has been contributing – unknowingly but regularly – around INS 8,750,000 (roughly U.S. $2,190,000) per month to keep the Palestinian terrorist Tanzim militia afloat – a total of INS 122,500,000 (about U.S. $31 million) since September 2000.
International terror experts estimate Osama bin Laden’s war chest for his terror campaign worldwide as running to some $300 million. The Ramallah Force 17 documents, showing only a small portion of Arafat’s outlay on his terror offensive against Israel alone, demonstrate that the Palestinian is spending funds on a scale not far short of the Saudi-born terrorist.
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