Gantz received Abbas at his home in a Tel Aviv suburb on Tuesday evening, in what is the first time Abbas has met an Israeli official inside Israel since 2010.
Gantz’s office said the minister “approved confidence-building measures that include transferring tax payments to the Palestinian Authority, granting hundreds of permits to prominent Palestinian merchants and officials, and approving residency status for thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”
Israel collects hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes on behalf of the Palestinian Authority as part of interim peace agreements signed in the 1990s.
Tax transfers are a major source of funding for cash-strapped Palestinians, but Israel has withheld these funds because the Palestinian Authority has paid stipends to thousands of families whose relatives have been killed, injured or imprisoned during the conflict.
Israel has agreed to grant residency to some 9,500 Palestinians, controls the Palestinian population registry, and for years its policies have left tens of thousands of Palestinians living without legal status, severely limiting their freedom of movement, even within the occupied territories.
Israel granted legal status to about 4,000 Palestinians last October.
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