TERROR CONSTITUTION: “Palestinian” Constitution Codifies Pay-For Slay and Terrorist Payments, Elevates Sharia as Supreme Law

A newly released draft constitution for a future Palestinian state, made public at the direction of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, has drawn sharp criticism for several provisions.

The document designates Islam as the official religion and Sharia as the primary source of legislation but making no mention of Judaism or Jewish historical ties to Jerusalem. It declares Jerusalem the capital and references an “inalienable” right of return for fictional “Palestinians” and their descendants without clarifying that return would apply only to a future “Palestinian” state rather than Israel.

Critics also argue that Article 24 effectively codifies continued financial support for the families of “martyrs” and prisoners — language long associated with the PA’s controversial payments to convicted terrorists and their families, commonly referred to as “pay-for-slay.” Although Abbas previously claimed the program was ended and restructured, U.S. assessments have said payments continued under a modified system.

Israel didn’t expend untold blood and treasure for this barbarity. Israel didn’t fight for its survival to see terror enshrined in law.

This is the document, their founding principles. Who they are and what they believe.

Read every word. You can read it here.

PA’s Draft Constitution Enshrines Pay-for-Slay, Defines Palestine as Part of ‘Arab Homeland’

By Shula Rosen, February 16, 2026:

A draft of a constitution for a future Palestinian state made public this week cemented in law the pay-for slay program, omitted any mention of the Jews’ historic ties to Jerusalem and appeared to endorse the idea that descendants of Palestinians displaced during the 1948 war have a so-called “right of return” to Israel.

The fourth article designates Islam as the official religion and Islamic Sharia as the principal source of legislation. While Christianity is accorded a protected status, Judaism is not mentioned in the article or anywhere else in the text. Neither are Jews.

Article 24 assigned to the future state the duty to “work to provide protection and care for the families of martyrs, wounded, and prisoners, and those released from the occupation prisons and the victims of genocide.”

Last year Abbas announced the cancellation of the PA’s terror rewards program known as “pay-for-slay,” saying that the payments to terrorist prisoners and so-called martyrs’ families would be reconfigured into a more general social welfare program. Yet Article 24 suggests that financial support for perpetrators of terror remains a priority.

The text was made public at the order of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

It makes references to the Palestinians’ “right of return” without clarifying that the return would be to the future Palestinian state.

Mitch Scheinder wrote:

They Wrote Pay-for-Slay into Their Constitution

Article XXIV commits the Palestinian state to providing “protection and care for the families of martyrs, wounded, and prisoners, and those released from the occupation prisons.”

In PA official language, “martyrs” means terrorists who killed Israelis. “Prisoners” means terrorists serving sentences in Israeli jails. This is not welfare. This is the pay-for-slay program, the PA’s system of monthly salaries to terrorists and their families, calibrated to the severity of the attack. The more Israelis you kill, the larger the pension your family receives.

It’s now enshrined in their foundational legal document.

This matters because Abbas drew international headlines in February 2025 claiming he had ended this program. Western governments celebrated. European nations used his announcement to advance Palestinian statehood recognition.

The U.S. State Department then formally assessed in February 2026 that the PA paid over $200 million to terrorists and their families in 2025, the very year he claimed the program was over. Rather than ending the payments, the PA restructured them to make them harder for donors to track.

There is an American you should know about. His name was Taylor Force. He was 28 years old, a West Point graduate and Army veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was walking in Tel Aviv in 2016 when a Palestinian terrorist stabbed him to death in the street. The terrorist’s family immediately began receiving a monthly pension from the PA. The Taylor Force Act, signed into law in 2018, cut U.S. aid to the PA until the payments stop.

They never stopped. They just changed the accounting.

Abbas told the Fatah Revolutionary Council: “Even if we only have one cent left, it will be for the prisoners and martyrs.”

Then he wrote it into a constitution.

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Sharia Law. For Everyone. Muslim or Not.

Article IV declares Islam as the official religion of the State of Palestine and establishes Islamic Sharia as “the primary source for legislation.”

Not a personal law for Muslim citizens. Not a framework for religious matters. The primary source for everything. For everyone.

The PA has spent decades presenting itself to the West as secular and democratic. This constitution abandons that pretense entirely.

Sharia as the primary source of legislation means women’s freedom of movement, right to marry, divorce, travel, and inherit are all governed by religious law. It means homosexuality is not a lifestyle choice but a criminal offense. Gay Palestinians flee to Israel for safety today. Under the constitution the progressive world is cheering for, those same people would be imprisoned.

The European Court of Human Rights has twice ruled Sharia incompatible with fundamental human rights. The PA just made it the supreme law of their future state.

Judaism Does Not Exist in This Document

The draft constitution declares Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Palestine and commits to preserving its “holy sites for Islam and Christianity.”

Judaism is not mentioned. Not once. Not anywhere in the entire document.

The Western Wall. The Temple Mount, site of the First and Second Temples. The Mount of Olives. The tombs of the patriarchs and matriarchs. Three thousand years of Jewish history in Jerusalem, written out of a constitution that claims the city as its capital.

This is not an oversight. This is policy. PA textbooks do not acknowledge the existence of the Jewish Temples. PA officials have repeatedly stated that the Western Wall is an Islamic site. This constitution formalizes that denial into foundational law.

And there’s something else about how Christianity shows up in this document. Jesus was born Jewish. He lived as a Jew. He observed Jewish law. The Last Supper was a Passover Seder. The earliest church was built by Jewish men and women in the Jewish homeland. Christianity grew from Jewish roots in Jewish soil.

A constitution that protects Christian holy sites while erasing every trace of Jewish history from the same city is not protecting Christianity. It’s using Christianity as a shield. The people whose faith appears in this document as diplomatic cover deserve to know that.

The “Right of Return” Is Not About Going Home

The preamble describes the constitution as an extension of the Palestinian struggle, with “the dream of return” remaining alive “in the hearts of Palestinians everywhere, generation after generation.” The draft defines the right of return as inalienable. It does not clarify that this right applies only to a future Palestinian state.

The implication is deliberate. Not return to Palestine. Return to Israel. A “right of return” for 5.9 million UNRWA-registered descendants into sovereign Israel is not humanitarian. It’s a demographic strategy to eliminate the Jewish majority in the world’s only Jewish state without firing a single rocket.

There is another refugee story from 1948. Approximately 850,000 Jews were expelled from Arab countries. From Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Yemen, Libya. Israel absorbed every single one. There are no Jewish refugee camps. No perpetual Jewish refugee status passed through generations. No UN agency dedicated exclusively to their grievance.

Israel didn’t build refugee camps. It built a country.

Jews Never Left This Land

The constitution erases Judaism from Jerusalem. So let me remind the world of something.

The world speaks about Jewish history in Israel as though it is a claim. It is not a claim. It is a fact written in stone, in soil, in DNA, and in blood.

The Merneptah Stele, an Egyptian artifact from 1200 BCE, is the oldest known reference to Israel in recorded history. Jewish coins found in this soil. The Dead Sea Scrolls. Silver amulets excavated in Jerusalem with the oldest known biblical text, dating to the 7th century BCE. Genetic studies published in Nature and Science confirming that Jewish populations worldwide share common ancestry tracing back to the ancient Levant.

But here is what most people don’t know: Jews never fully left. There has been a continuous Jewish presence in this land for over 3,000 years. In Jerusalem. In Hebron. In Safed. In Tiberias. Through every empire that conquered and occupied, from Rome to Byzantium to the Crusaders to the Ottomans to the British, Jews remained.

And they were attacked for it long before 1948.

In 1929, Arab mobs descended on the Jewish community of Hebron, a city where Jews had lived continuously for centuries. They slaughtered 67 Jewish men, women, and children. They mutilated bodies. They burned homes. There was no State of Israel. There was no “occupation.” There were no settlements, no checkpoints, no blockade. There were just Jews, living in their ancient city, and they were massacred for being Jews.

That was 19 years before Israel declared independence. Before every excuse the world uses today to explain violence against Jews existed.

This Was Always Going to Be the Document They Wrote

Who was the President of Palestine before 1948?

Who was the Prime Minister? What was the currency? What were the borders? What language did Palestinians speak that was distinct from the Arabic spoken across 22 other Arab nations?

There is no answer. A distinct Palestinian state has never existed as a political entity. Not once in history. The land was part of the Ottoman Empire for 400 years until 1917, then administered under a British Mandate until 1948. When the British left, Israel declared independence based on the 1947 UN partition plan. The Arab states rejected it and sent five armies to destroy the new Jewish state.

Here is what happened next, and this is the part nobody tells you. Jordan annexed the West Bank. Egypt seized Gaza. Not one of the 22 Arab states that went to war supposedly on behalf of the Palestinian people offered them a state. They kept Palestinians stateless deliberately, as a political weapon against Israel, for decades.

The PA’s own constitution confirms this without meaning to. Their preamble describes Palestine as “part of the Arab homeland” and Palestinians as “part of the Arab nation.” There are 22 Arab states covering 13 million square kilometers. The entire land of Israel is 22,000 square kilometers. And not one of those 22 states offered their Palestinian brothers a state. They offered them a cause.

The Palestinian cause was never about building a state. It was about destroying one.

Arab armies waged war against Israel in 1948, 1967, and 1973. When conventional war failed, they turned to terrorism, through the PLO, through Hamas, through Hezbollah, through October 7, and through every day since.

In between, peace was offered. At Camp David in 2000, Barak offered a Palestinian state in the vast majority of the West Bank, all of Gaza, and a capital in East Jerusalem. Arafat’s answer was the Second Intifada, five years of suicide bombings that killed over a thousand Israelis. In 2008, Olmert made an offer even more generous. Abbas didn’t reject it. He didn’t counter it. He got up and walked away.

Then came October 7, 2023. The largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. 1,200 people murdered. 251 kidnapped. Families burned alive. Young people hunted at a music festival. Women raped and mutilated.

No nation in the history of the world has been rewarded with statehood after an attack of this magnitude against its neighbor.

And yet here we are, reading their constitution.

The Man Who Wrote This Has No Right to Write Anything

Mahmoud Abbas’s term as President of the Palestinian Authority expired in January 2009. He has been ruling by decree ever since. Seventeen years past his democratic mandate. No election held. No vote taken. No Palestinian public consulted.

The last Palestinian legislative elections were in 2006, nearly two decades ago. Hamas won. Presidential elections haven’t happened since.

The man publishing a constitution for a democratic Palestinian state has not faced his own voters in seventeen years. He is an unelected autocrat writing the rules for a democracy he has never practiced.

And there is a problem nobody is asking about. Gaza, home to over two million Palestinians, is controlled by Hamas. Abbas has no authority there. So whose state is this constitution for? Does it cover Gaza? Does Hamas agree to it? Hamas’s own senior official, Bassem Naim, publicly denounced the draft as a “violation of the noble rights of our Palestinian people.”

The PA and Hamas aren’t arguing about whether to reject Jewish sovereignty. They’re arguing about who gets credit for doing it.

The international community is applauding a constitutional document published by an unelected leader for a territory he doesn’t fully control as proof of readiness for statehood.

The Country They Call Apartheid Has a Female Sharia Judge

One more thing before I finish.

Israel operates nine official Sharia courts, recognized under Israeli law and funded by the Israeli Ministry of Justice. Muslim citizens access Sharia courts for personal and family matters, just as Jewish citizens have the rabbinical Beit Din and Christian citizens have ecclesiastical courts across ten recognized Christian communities. Every single one operates under Israeli civil law, subject to Supreme Court review.

In 2017, Israel unanimously appointed a woman named Hana Mansour-Khatib as a Sharia court judge. Through the standard judicial selection process. A Muslim woman from the Galilee, presiding over a Sharia court, in the state the world calls an apartheid state.

Now look at what the PA wrote. Sharia as the primary source of all legislation. No civil law override. No Supreme Court protection. A presidential oath that invokes God Almighty. Christianity granted “protected status,” the language of second-class status, not equality. Judaism not mentioned at all.

Israel built a system where a Muslim woman can judge. The PA wrote a constitution where Sharia judges everyone. One of these is called apartheid. The world chose the wrong one.

Read It

The PA published this document themselves. They were not hacked. They were not misquoted. A 16-member committee drafted it. Their president ordered its publication. Every word is theirs.

For decades, these leaders stood at podiums in Brussels and Washington and the UN and told the world they want peace. They want democracy. They want two states living side by side.

Then they sat down to write their constitution. And they told the truth.

Not behind closed doors. Not in a leaked document. They published it and dared the world to read it. The world didn’t bother.

You hand them a state after reading this, the blood that follows is on your hands. Not theirs. Yours.

They warned you.