Lawsuit against US charity that employed Hamas captor dismissed

Judge claims that rescued hostage Almog Meir Jan failed to prove that the People Media Project knew its journalist was a member of Hamas.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The judge in a lawsuit brought by a former Hamas hostage dismissed the case against the American charity that employed his captor, saying he hadn’t proven that it knew its journalist was a member of the terror organization.

Almog Meir Jan had filed the lawsuit in Washington state against the People Media Project, its chief editor, and others, a month after he was rescued by the IDF along with two other hostages from the home of Abdallah Aljamal.

Aljamal wrote regularly for the Palestine Chronicle, a vehemently anti-Israel outlet owned by the People Media Project.

Jan alleged that the defendants “employed and compensated Aljamal as a journalist and provided him a U.S.-based platform to publish articles supporting Hamas,” although it is a U.S-designated foreign terrorist organization, said the court papers.

He further claimed that “through these actions, defendants aided and abetted his kidnapping and imprisonment.”

U.S. District Court Judge Tiffany Cartwright wrote in her decision that the Project could only be held accountable for aiding and abetting an act of terrorism if they “knew they were paying a Hamas operative.”

Because Jan’s complaint “does not allege actual knowledge,” his claim must be dismissed, she wrote.

She also accepted the defendants’ claim that the articles written by Aljamal were protected by the First Amendment’s “protection of speech on matters of public concern.”

The judge did leave room in her ruling for a renewed lawsuit.

“Because the deficiencies in Jan’s complaint could conceivably be cured through the allegation of other facts, the Court also grants Jan leave to amend” his complaint, she wrote, giving him until February 21 to do so.

Jan, Shlomi Ziv, and Andrey Kozlov were abducted from the Nova music festival during the Hamas-led invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023. Held together for eight months in the Aljamal apartment in the Nuseirat refugee camp, they were tortured both physically and psychologically.

This included being told constantly that they would be murdered by their captors and that their families didn’t care about them and being deliberately deprived of food and punished for the smallest infraction, such as being covered with blankets in the heat for hours after not asking permission to leave for the restroom.

Aljamal, who previously was a spokesman for the Gazan labor ministry under Hamas, was killed during the IDF operation in which the threesome were rescued in a daring daytime raid that also saw the successful rescue of another Nova hostage, Noa Argamani, from an apartment a few hundred meters away.