Wally Adeyemo, the deputy U.S. secretary of the treasury, spoke on Monday with Mohammad Mustafa, the Palestinian Authority prime minister, per a U.S. readout.
The U.S. and Palestinian officials addressed “security and economic stability in the West Bank, as well as the Palestinian Authority’s efforts to improve its anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism regime,” per the U.S. readout. (The Biden administration and others refer to Judea and Samaria as the West Bank.)
Adeyemo “stressed the importance of preventing terrorists and violent extremists from raising, using and moving funds in the West Bank,” according to the Treasury Department. He also noted the authority’s “progress on strengthening its countering the financing of terrorism regime,” including “completing key milestones” in assessing “risks within its jurisdiction and bolstering effective compliance with international standards,” according to the readout.
The U.S. official also “commended the Palestinian Authority for completing a risk assessment of their financial system” and for scheduling an evaluation of its banking system.
“These are both critical steps for ensuring financial linkages between the Palestinian territories and the international financial system continue,” the Treasury Department added. “They discussed the importance of the correspondent banking relationships between Israeli and Palestinian banks to the security and economic stability of the region.”
According to a 2024 U.S. State Department report, the “Palestinian public views favoritism (locally known as wasta) and nepotism as the most common forms of corruption according to a September 2022 poll by the Coalition for Integrity and Accountability, the Palestinian chapter of Transparency International.”
“The majority of the interviewed citizens believe that the sectors most susceptible to corruption are the government institutions, especially the senior employees in the executive public sector institutions (ministries, security services, local authorities),” according to the report. “The service delivery ministries (finance, health, social development, security institutions, education) are the most susceptible to corruption from the citizens’ perspective. However, corruption in the form of bribes is low.”
