TerrorismPalestinians to pay $10M to terror victims while appealing $218.5M verdict

The Palestinian Authority and the PLO, found liable in a lawsuit over Americans killed in terrorist attacks, must pay $10 million in cash, and an additional $1 million monthly payment while the case is on appeal, to secure the hundreds of millions awarded by a jury, a U.S. judge ruled on Monday.

Manhattan federal Judge George B Daniels said he had considered a motion filed this month by the U.S. State Department, which intervened in the case via the Department of Justice to make the argument that a high bond could strain the poor Palestinian Authority, destabilizing the region.

Fox News reports that the amount of the payment was proposed by a lawyer for the PLO and the Palestinian Authority (PA), who argued that forcing the PA make an expensive bond payment would be an unbearable imposition on the people living in the Palestinian territories.

“Respectfully, a million means a lot to the Palestinian Authority,” Mitchell Berger told the judge, saying that the amount was equal to welfare payment for 9,500 families or for building one school in Gaza.

Kent Yalowitz, a lawyer representing victims and survivors of terrorist attacks which killed thirty-three people and injured hundreds more, had asked that the PA pay $20 million, saying the ordered payment would amount to a “rounding error” for them. He has said the PA has more than sufficient funds to make a higher bond payment, arguing it spends $60 million annually on paying terrorists held in Israeli prisons.

“I’m disappointed in the amount,” he said. “I’m eager to get the appellate process completed.”

“This is a very serious blow to the terror victims who spent eleven years litigating against these terrorist defendants,” attorney Nitsana Darshan Leitner told Fox News, arguing that the defendants “certainly can afford to pay many of millions of dollars for a bond to ensure they don’t just run off and refuse to pay the court judgement after they lose at trial.”

Leitner also criticized the State Department for “heavy handed interference” in the case — referring to a “statement of interest” filed in the case weeks earlier in which the State and Justice departments urged Daniels not to force the PA and PLO to post bond of up to $30 million per month while they appeal the jury’s decision.

Daniels said that if the PA pays $10 million to the court by the end of September and then makes $1 million monthly payments, the jury-awarded damages will not be collected until the appeals court rules in the case.

A jury awarded $218.5 million in damages earlier this year in a lawsuit brought by victims and survivors of bombings and shootings by Palestinian terrorists in Israel from 2002 to 2004 (see “Judgment against Palestinian Authority for supporting terrorism unlikely to be collected,” HSNW, 25 February 2015).

The damages were automatically tripled, to $655.50 million, by the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Act.