The Palestinian Authority has stopped paying stipends to at least 1,612 Palestinian security prisoners in Israeli jails, two Palestinian sources told The Times of Israel on Sunday, as Ramallah appeared to move forward with a reform of its controversial welfare system.

In February, PA President Mahmoud Abbas signed a decree canceling legislation that established the old system, which included payments to the families of slain terrorists and the families of security prisoners held in Israeli jails, based on the length of their sentence.

The decree also established a new non-governmental body that was tasked with providing welfare payments strictly based on economic need. Palestinians — including the families of prisoners and slain attackers — will be able to apply for welfare stipends, and bureaucrats will adjudicate whether each applicant will receive payments and how much based on economic criteria, Palestinian and US officials have told The Times of Israel.

The transition to the new system has taken time, but last month, senior Palestinian official Hussein al-Sheikh — who has since been formally appointed Abbas’s deputy — penned a letter to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio inviting the Trump administration to send a delegation to Ramallah from June 1 onward in order to certify that the PA has implemented the reform and is in compliance with US legislation that bars American aid that directly benefits the PA so long as its previous prisoner payment system remained in place.

Palestinian sources told The Times of Israel in March and April that families of prisoners and slain attackers were still receiving stipends based on the old system, as the new system was not in place. But that is no longer the case for at least 1,612 prisoners, who did not receive a stipend for the month of May, the two sources said.

The sources did not know what that meant for the thousands of other prisoners and could not elaborate further on the figure.

Critics argued that the old policy incentivized terror and dubbed it “pay-to-slay.” Palestinian leaders have long defended the stipends, describing them as a form of social welfare and necessary compensation for victims of what they said is Israel’s callous military justice system in the West Bank.

Though the PA’s reform was largely finalized under the Biden administration, Ramallah decided to hold off on announcing the move, preferring to save it as a goodwill gesture for the incoming Trump administration.