Tens of thousands of Gaza Strip residents who are on the Palestinian Authority payroll have been terribly worried this past week. That is because it was disclosed that the PA may well cut hundreds, even thousands, of names from the payroll in the very near future.
The term “employed by the Authority in Gaza” is misleading, since most PA civil servants in Gaza are forcibly unemployed after they were fired from their jobs by the Hamas government. Exceptions: those who work in the border crossings and the health services. Thus, the PA in Ramallah still has direct responsibility for the fate of about 55,000 people who receive salaries even though they actually do not work.
