US Supreme Court to rule on $655 million terror lawsuit against Palestinian Authority

A federal appeals court had thrown out a $655 million judgment against the Palestinian Authority saying the US lacked jurisdiction.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The Supreme Court accepted a case Friday that will decide if the Palestinian Authority (PA) and its main backer that represents it abroad, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), can be sued in the U.S. for terror acts committed in Israel against American citizens.

The hearing will be held in the spring, with a judgment probably rendered around June 2025.

In the original 2015 case, families of terror victims in Israel won $218.5 million in damages for six attacks that took place between 2002-2004, proving that the PA and PLO were materially involved in or incited their execution.

A longstanding anti-terror law meant that the amount was automatically tripled to $655.5 million.

While the district court judge had found that his court had jurisdiction over the defendants, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit rejected this decision the next year.

The higher court said that the PA and PLO did not have sufficient contacts with the U.S. to be sued there for terrorist acts committed in Israel.

To correct that gap, in 2019 Congress passed the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act (PSJVTA). This declared that both the PA and PLO are “deemed to have consented to personal jurisdiction” in any civil case brought under the 1992 Anti-Terror law, as long as either group was active in the U.S. and paid the terrorists, or their families if they were dead, at any point after 2019.

The PA has been compensating such terrorists and their families for many years, on a sliding scale depending on how heinous were their acts, in what is known as the Palestinians’ “pay for slay” official policy.

When Congress passed a law in 2014 to defund the PA if it continued the program, the PA simply changed the name of the office funneling the payments to the “PLO Commission of Prisoners Affairs.”

In 2022, a federal judge ruled that the PSJVTA was unconstitutional because Congress “cannot simply declare anything it wants to be [considered] consent,” agreeing with the PA and PLO that the law was improperly forcing them to agree to be sued, thus violating their due process rights.

The Supreme Court will be hearing two cases together, that of Fuld vs. Palestine Liberation Organization and United States vs. Palestine Liberation Organization.

Ari Fuld was an American citizen and prominent pro-Israel activist murdered by a Palestinian terrorist in the Gush Etzion shopping mall in 2018, and his family and others brought the lawsuit under his name.

The Biden administration also requested the highest court’s intervention, saying that the lower court’s actions had undercut Congress’ decision that the PSJVTA was “an important measure to further U.S. interests and protect and compensate U.S. nationals.”

A lawyer representing families in the case, Kent Yalowitz, said in response to the news, “We’re encouraged by the court’s acceptance of the case for review, and our families are looking forward to restoration of the judgment in their favor and a long-overdue measure of justice for the horrific attacks against them.”

Court hearingPalestinian AuthorityTerror VictimsUS Supreme Court