With broad support from over 70 lawmakers, legislation that will revoke the citizenship or residency of convicted terrorists who are remunerated by the Palestinian Authority cleared its preliminary reading on the Knesset floor on Wednesday.
The bill applies to both Israeli citizens and permanent residents incarcerated following a terror conviction. The Palestinian Authority regularly pays stipends to convicted terrorists, and the bill also applies to organizations that pay out on the PA’s behalf.
Notching a rare reprieve from coalition-opposition acrimony, centrist and right-wing opposition lawmakers joined coalition MKs to submit seven similar citizenship revocation bills, which will be whittled done to a unified proposal in the committee review process.
The first of four votes necessary before becoming a law, the preliminary reading followed the release last week of Karim Younis, Israel’s longest-serving terror convict, after 40 years of imprisonment.
Likud MK Ofir Katz, who presented the leading bill proposal, tied the initiative to stopping the veneration of terrorists as heroes among Arab Israelis. Younis, who killed IDF soldier Avraham Bromberg in 1980, was feted in his hometown of ‘Ara.
