Freed hostage suing US nonprofit linked to his Hamas captor

Almog Meir Jan was held by a journalist who wrote for a news website owned by the People Media Project.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

One of three rescued hostages held captive by a journalist active in Hamas on Tuesday sued the American nonprofit that runs his captor’s media outlet.

For eight months, Almog Meir Jan suffered in the hands of Abdallah Aljamal, a Hamas spokesman who wrote regularly for the Palestine Chronicle, a news website owned by the Olympia, Washington-based People Media Project.

Senior Project board members John Harvey and Ramzy Baroud, who is also the editor-in-chief of the Chronicle, were named as co-defendant in the lawsuit, which was filed in Washington State.

The lawsuit charged that “the Defendants permitted Hamas Operative Aljamal to use their platform to whitewash Hamas’s crimes and attract international support for its terrorist cause.”

By providing him with this platform and paying him, it continued, the “Defendants aided, abetted, and materially supported both Hamas Operative Aljamal and Hamas itself in their acts of terrorism, including kidnapping and holding Plaintiff hostage for 246 days, in violation of international law,” the suit continued.

Whoever knowingly provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization is breaking U.S. law and can be fined, imprisoned for up to 20 years, or both.

Jason Torchinsky of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, which filed the case on Jan’s behalf, told Fox News Digital that “Palestine Chronicle needs to be held accountable for its support of the Hamas operative who held our client hostage in Gaza.”

“We filed this suit to seek relief for our client and to help expose the network of Hamas-linked PR fronts operating within the United States,” he added.

The People Media Project is listed as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. Already last month, Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) called for its tax-exempt status to be removed.

“To find out that a journalist, quote unquote, was engaged in the holding of hostages is deeply troubling,” the lawmaker told Fox News Digital. “And that’s why myself and my colleagues have called for the 501(c)(3) status to be revoked and to make sure that we certainly, as the United States, government and U.S. taxpayers are not giving benefits, in any way, to entities or organizations affiliated with terrorism.”

The Palestine Chronicle is a vehemently anti-Israel outlet. One of its other correspondents, Mahmoud Ajjour, was outed earlier this month by communications analyst Eitan Fischberger as a Hamas supporter who has posted tutorials on social media about how to commit stabbing attacks and mourned the deaths of terrorists.

Jan was rescued in June along with two others held captive with him, Shlomi Ziv and Andrey Kozlov. In a daring daylight operation, IDF forces broke into the Aljamal home and got them out, along with a fourth hostage, Noa Argamani, who was being held in a different home a few hundred meters away.

Aljamal was killed during the firefight that ensued during the rescue.