Palestinian salaries late as Israel stops funds (Make some popcorn. This is going to be fun.)

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - The Palestinian Authority will be about two weeks late paying salaries to an estimated 140,000 workers and security personnel due to Israel's withholding of vital tax funds, a top official said on Thursday.

Israel froze tax revenue transfers to the cash-strapped Palestinian Authority starting this month in a bid to isolate the Islamic militant group Hamas, which won the January 25 Palestinian election and has started forming a new government.

As many as one in four Palestinians is dependent on wages from the Authority, prompting warnings this week from international envoy James Wolfensohn and the United Nations that violence could break out if salaries were not paid.

"We expect employees will get their salaries in about two weeks from now," Palestinian Economy Minister Mazen Sonnoqrot told Reuters. "We are still demanding Israel pay back our money. This is our money."

Sonnoqrot said it would most likely take the Palestinian Authority until mid-March to obtain funds pledged by the European Union and Arab donors in order to meet the February payroll. The Authority normally pays salaries on the second or third day of each month.

The European Union threw the Palestinians a short-term aid lifeline of $143 million (120 million euros) this week, but only a small portion of that money will go to the Palestinian Authority to pay salaries.

In addition to funds from the EU, the Palestinian Authority expects to receive emergency aid within weeks from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Norway and Russia, Wolfensohn has told the Quartet of Middle East mediators -- the EU, the United States, Russia and the United Nations.

He estimated that the Authority needed $60-$80 million to pay February salaries, and tens of millions of dollars more to avert financial collapse in the coming weeks.

Wolfensohn warned the financial crisis could result in a spike in "violence and chaos" before Israel's March 28 general election. A separate U.N. report said the non-payment of 73,000 Palestinian security staff could lead to "a rise in criminality, kidnapping and protection rackets".

A Gaza-based offshoot of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction, issued a statement earlier on Thursday threatening to kidnap foreigners who come to the strip if salaries were not paid.

Israel's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mark Regev, said Israel stood by its decision to withhold Palestinian tax revenues from a government that will be led by Hamas, whose charter calls for the Jewish state's destruction.

Regev blamed a Palestinian Authority hiring and spending spree for the current financial crisis.

This is too funny. How in the WORLD are they going to "destroy Israel" and still get their salaries paid?

How dare you bring logic and common sense into the discussion of this 60 year old festering putrid sore on the face of our planet!

Have you no shame?!

Don't you realize that if you apply some common sense and logic to this that you might bring to an end all the misery and suffering death and destruction both sides have thrived on for decades in this man made cancerous quagmire?

What on earth is the matter with you?

Can't you see how hard the great minds and the political leaders of the world strive with all their might and our tax dollars to keep this problem alive and well...er..to solve this problem?

Next thing you will want to know is what would happen if we and the rest of the world would quit providing food, water, housing. electricity, medical care for these people.

Now we have to be very careful here.

If we stop paying these Arabs or Palestinians to be refugees and live in these camps that they might just wander back and assimilate into the societies they came from.

Then where would the world's most loved,popular and well funded conflict be?.

. Or maybe you'll ask something dangerously logical along a similar line like why don't the world cut off the money to the PA and all the terrorist it pays.

Don't you know if the terrorist don't get their monthly check and if there is no money in it that they might get mad and quit killing Jews and the real Palestinians that that do want peace. Come on, be reasonable, what are we going to do with all those out of work terrorists?

Then, heaven forbid, that you may cause someone else to ask a question like if the Jews are really as bad as the Muslims say they are and slaughter them and their children every chance they get, then why do they scream and clamor to get in to Israel every time the borders are closed so they can get to the only jobs ever made available to them in the region.

Maybe somebody may ask why if the Jews sacrifice Arab babies, why did those Arabs who stayed in 1948 didn't run the first chance they got but stayed kept their property and opened businesses and now have elected members in the government of Israel.

Then maybe some one would say, maybe if we didn't pay people to be refugees and terrorists and promise them grand things like their very own state then maybe they would get hungry,thirsty or wet and cold and decide they had better find some means of livelihood and spend less time building rockets and marching in the street.

Perhaps they would quit trying to take what their neighbors have built out of wasteland and instead clinging to perpetual victim hood for another half- century they would move on find something constructive instead of destructive to do with the hearts and their hands.

You really should be more careful about asking good logical intelligent questions, you might start a trend. ;^)

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