The jury in a Federal District Court in New York found the Palestinian Authority (PA) and PLO liable under an American terrorism law for six terror attacks against Israeli targets in which Americans were wounded and killed and awarded the victims $218.5 million, The New York Times reported today.
The jury in Federal District Court in Manhattan awarded $218.5 million in damages, a number that is automatically tripled to $655.5 million under the special terrorism law under which the case was brought.
The damages were awarded according to the dictates of the United States Anti-Terrorism Act of 1990, “which allows American nationals who are victims of international terrorism to sue in the United States courts.”
The case was brought on behalf of ten families whose members had been physically and psychologically injured by the terror attacks, as well as the estates of four victims who were killed.
The father of one of the victims recounted how he realized that it was his daughter among the dead. “They brought a body bag out on the TV station, right on it, and went right down to where she was laying and I knew it was a girl, had blond hair. ‘Oh, my goodness, that’s Janis.’”
The Associated Press (AP) reported that the plaintiffs proved their case by using internal PA documents:
The plaintiffs also relied on internal records showing the Palestinian Authority continued to pay the salaries of employees who were put behind bars in terror cases and paid benefits to families of suicide bombers and gunmen who died committing the attacks.
“Where are the documents punishing employees for killing people?” Yalowitz asked. “We don’t have anything like that in this case. … They didn’t roll that way.”
The AP also quoted the plaintiffs’ attorney.
“It’s about accountability. It’s about justice,” attorney Kent Yalowitz said. He and an attorney with the Israel Law Center, which helped with the case, vowed to collect the damages by pursuing Palestinian Authority and PLO bank accounts, securities accounts, real estate and other property that may be in the U.S., Israel and elsewhere.
“Now, the PLO and the Palestinian Authority know there is a price” for supporting terrorism, Israel Law Center attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner said.
The defense argued that the terrorists were not acting on behalf of the PA.
Last September, a federal court in Brooklyn found that the Amman-based Arab Bank was liable for financing terror attacks committed by Hamas. According to the Times, at the time, “[t]he plaintiffs had to prove that the terrorist attacks were indeed conducted by Hamas, and that the bank’s support of Hamas was the ‘proximate cause’ of the events.”
In The Woman Who Makes the Jihadis Squirm, which was published in the February 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine, editor David Hazony explained how Darshan-Leitner used existing legislation to pursue justice for terror victims.
Starting in the late 1990s, Nitsana began filing a series of motions on behalf of terror victims, first in Israel, and then with the help of local counsel, in federal courts in the United States. The U.S. offered a whole range of possibilities, in part because of the vast assets that foreign governments and individuals held there, and the size of the awards judges were willing to hand down, but also because of a range of laws that allowed for damages to be sought. The Anti-Terrorism Act of 1990 provided for U.S. citizens to sue terrorists and their abettors for damages. The Alien Torts Claims Act (1789) and the Torture Victim Protection Act (1991) allowed non-Americans to sue anyone in the United States who had victimized them. Under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1978, any country that sponsored terrorism could be sued for attacks carried out by the groups it supported. And later on, after the terror attacks of September 2001, Congress passed a series of new laws, including the Financial Anti-Terrorism Act and the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, that would make it much easier both to sue those who funded terrorism and to collect the damages.
“We filed dozens of cases in 1999 and 2000. Every one tested a different legal theory, used a different never-been-tried argument. Every one meant depositions and research, going through the awful details. In some cases we had to invent the process too, not just the argument. How do you serve a lawsuit on Hamas? They don’t have an office you can just show up at with a process server. We had to ask an Israeli prison warden to serve papers on a Hamas leader sitting in jail. What about Iran? Do you FedEx a lawsuit to ‘the government’ in Tehran? International couriers didn’t go there. Send a fax to the embassy? Serve Hezbollah in South Lebanon? Nobody had ever tried these things before.
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