fbpx

RECENT NEWS

Terror on Trial

Israeli High Court rules terror victims can sue the Palestinian Authority for compensation

Court determines PA’s ‘pay-for-slay’ policy makes it liable for damages

Wikipedia

Israel's Supreme Court.

Victims of terror will be able to sue the Palestinian Authority in Israel after Israel’s High Court of Justice rejected the PA’s first-ever petition to an Israeli court this week.

The PA asked the court to overturn a law passed in March 2024 that would allow victims of terror and their relatives to seek compensation from Ramallah.  

Before the law was passed, terror victims and their families could either sue individual perpetrators for damages or receive compensation from Israel’s National Insurance Institute. The new law will allow them to do both, and will raise the level of damages possible for plaintiffs to collect to 10 million per victim murdered and to 5 million for permanent disability.

The law specifies that the PA may be a target of such lawsuits, allowing the family to sue anyone who “provides a salary” for acts of terrorism. The suit notes that the PA “pays monthly salaries to terrorists as remuneration for carrying out such acts.” 

It specifies that, in such lawsuits, the compensation can come from taxes Israel collects for and is meant to distribute to the PA. Israel already limits transfers of those funds after the Knesset passed a law in 2018 freezing the equivalent amount to how much the PA pays terrorists and their families each year, a practice known as “pay-for-slay,” and withheld more money after the Oct. 7 attacks in fear that the resources may reach Hamas. The 2018 bill initially proposed that the tax money automatically go to victims of terror and their families, but that did not make it into the final law. 

The petition against the law was controversial in Israel, with the relatives of Israelis murdered by Palestinian terrorists interrupting the proceedings to protest that the PA was given standing in the High Court.

Israeli Attorney General Gali Baharav Meara advised the court last summer against taking the case, saying that “it is hard to accept that a court in Israel will open its doors to the Palestinian Authority and hear its claims about harm to its constitutional rights while it continues with its despicable and disgraceful policy” of “paying … massive amounts to those involved in acts of terror and their relatives.” 

In his ruling this week, acting Supreme Court President Isaac Amit acknowledged the PA’s so-called “pay-for-slay” policy, which he called “disgusting” and “intolerable,” but defended accepting the case.

In the decision to keep the law in place, Amit rejected the argument that the PA will collapse economically as a result of the lawsuits. 

“The petitioner [the PA] claims its rights were violated,” he wrote, “but the violation comes from its actions and choices to pay money and benefits to the murderers smeared in the blood of innocent Israelis. The PA has the possibility to choose a different path and stop its policy that rewards and encourages acts of terror.”  

Maurice Hirsch, Director of the Initiative for Palestinian Authority Accountability and Reform in the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, which filed an amicus brief in support of the law, told Jewish Insider that “the petition submitted by the PA against the law was an absolute disgrace, and should have been automatically rejected … One of the fundamental requirements of submitting any petition to the Supreme Court is that the petitioner come with ‘clean hands,’” — meaning in good faith — “Not only are the hands of the PA not clean, they are in fact soaked in the blood of hundreds of victims of terror.“ 

Hirsch noted that, after the High Court accepted the PA’s petition, the process took six months, during which “there were countless reports from lawyers representing the victims of terror that the lower courts were postponing giving decisions based on the law until the Supreme Court made its decision.”

“For decades, the PA has implemented a multi-billion-dollar policy to promote, incentivize and reward terror,” Hirsch added. “The law passed by the Knesset was designed to exact a substantial price from the PA for that ‘pay-for-slay’ policy.”

Subscribe now to
the Daily Kickoff

The politics and business news you need to stay up to date, delivered each morning in a must-read newsletter.