By Cissie Zhang —
It’s a heart-wrenching ad that pops up on your YouTube: support the orphans of Gaza.
Who could be so cold hearted as to refuse the charity?
There’s only one problem. These orphans are the children of the “martyrs.”
If that doesn’t raise a red flag for you, then you’re probably not immersed in the messaging of Hamas and other terrorist groups.
By dictionary definition, a “martyr” is someone who dies for their religion. Christian martyrs, for examples, were killed by gladiators and starved savage animals in the arenas of the Roman Empire.
But what are the Palestinian martyrs?
They are the terrorists who, killing Jews in Israel, got killed themselves.
Hamas and their terrorist counterparts on the West Bank have an ongoing scheme to tempt Palestinians to commit terrorism. If you die “fighting for the land of Palestine,” your family, your wife, your children will receive lifetime payments from the governing authorities.
And warm-hearted, generous Westerners, wanting to help, are unwittingly funding terrorism.
What the Palestinians are doing is called “Pay to Slay,” as in slay a Jew, get pay for your family.
Couple the lifetime income for the fam with the Islamic belief that jihadists who die get a guaranteed entry into eternal Paradise with 73 virgins to enjoy sex with for all of eternity, and you get lines for people willing to put on a bomb vest and go explode it surrounded by Israelis.
Or ride a motorbike into Israel and shoot up concert-goers.
The pay-to-slay policies of the Palestinians have been criticized by the West, who has pressured Fatah and others to end them.
Often, the Palestians try to placate the Westerners for whom they dish out a stead stream of propaganda that they are the oppressed victims. The authorities tell Westerners basically, Ok, we’ll stop the program.
No more pay to slay, they say.
But then they give a different message to their own people: We will continue paying family members of “martyrs;” we’re just reshuffling the payments through different departments to make it look to Westerners like we’re stopping.
Reality: Pay-to-slay is still ongoing.
So said Fatah official Amer Issa in Syria. He was interviewed on Awda TV (Palestinian Authority) in broadcast that was monitored, translated and uploaded on MEMRI TV on Feb. 20, 2025:
“We are [being accused] of selling out and forsaking the martyrs and the wounded,” Amer Issa said. “The opposite is true. Since we do not want to forsake the martyrs, their families, our prisoners, and our wounded, our leaders resorted to this method in order to make sure that our very last penny would go to the families of the martyrs and the wounded.”
TV Host: “In other words, it was moved from one ministry to the other?”
Amer Issa: “Exactly.”
Earlier, Amer Issa said, “There is a very important issue that sparked controversy – [the claim] that the Palestinian leadership stopped the payments to the families of the martyrs, the prisoners, and the wounded. This is an evasion attempt by our leaders like it has done in the past.
“It is an attempt to protect the payments to the families of the martyrs, the wounded, and the prisoners. Our Palestinian leaders are subject to daily American, European, and Arab [pressure] to stop this aid, but they have refused to do so for years. This type of extortion is nothing new. Changing the labeling preserves the honor of the martyrs, their families, and the prisoners.”
This is official acknowledgment that the sponsorship of terrorism is continuing. They do double-messaging: to the West they say one thing, to insiders another. But they don’t seem to be too careful about their secret messaging.
Everybody would like to help a Palestinian orphan. But would you do so in a scheme that sponsors terrorism?
