Palestinians respond to Israel’s stranglehold on West Bank economy by forgiving each other’s debts
Qassam Muaddi reports in Mondoweiss on 18 September 2026:
On September 4, at 7:00 a.m., Palestinian journalist Alaa Rimawi posted a simple call on his Facebook page: forgive the debts owed to you. By 8:00 a.m., responses forgiving half a million shekels had already come in. By Tuesday, the total had reached 75 million shekels — approximately $24 million.
The campaign, which Rimawi named “Forgive for the Sake of God,” spread rapidly across the West Bank, drawing thousands of responses from individuals, business owners, and companies. A clothing store owner in Silet al-Daher, north of Jenin, filmed himself burning a registry notebook containing 47,000 shekels in customer debts. A chicken business in Silwad, east of Ramallah, published a photo of a debt ledger totaling 250,000 shekels, with a note stating that all of it was forgiven. A lawyer shared that his client had dropped two court cases against debtors over bounced bank checks. A sidewalk vendor who sells corn forgave a cleaning worker who owed him 36 shekels.
“They might not be much,” Rimawi told Mondoweiss, “but 36 shekels is a big difference both for a sidewalk vendor and for a cleaning worker.”
The campaign’s scale reflects the depth of an economic crisis that has been building in the West Bank for years — one that Israel’s policies have systematically deepened, and that has left hundreds of thousands of Palestinians surviving on debt, reduced salaries, and depleted savings with no public safety net to fall back on.
The making of a crisis
The economic crisis in the West Bank had started before October 2023. Since 2019, Israel has withheld parts of Palestinian customs revenue – money it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority (PA) through its control of the borders.