Multibillion-dollar lawsuit in Israel against Arab Bank
▻https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2020/01/israel-jordan-arab-bank-terror-victims-jerusalem-court.html
The Jordan-based Arab Bank was served with a precedent-setting, 20-billion-shekel ($5.75 billion) lawsuit Dec. 29 in Jerusalem’s District Court. Behind the suit were 1,132 victims and casualties of terrorism and their families, who are accusing the bank of cooperating, supporting, abetting, funding and encouraging terrorist activities, which resulted in thousands of casualties. The plaintiffs claim that the bank was involved in funding terrorist attacks in Israel carried out by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah and other terrorist organizations.
Among other things, this lawsuit is based on a similar, successful lawsuit against the Arab Bank in the United States in 2004. Initially, Israeli and American citizens filed the suit together, but the court decided to separate the American and the Israeli plaintiffs. The final compromise ruling covered victims of terrorism, who held American citizenship.
The plaintiffs proved that the bank cooperated with terrorist organizations by opening private bank accounts for the families of terrorists, with which they could receive money from donors. The bank admitted that it did, in fact, transfer tens of millions of dollars to these accounts, but denied that it had any connection to Palestinian terrorist organizations. After many years of legal wrangling, a federal court in New York found the bank liable for knowingly supporting terrorist factions of Hamas, which were responsible for dozens of terrorist attacks between 2001 and 2004, in which American citizens were among the victims. Then, in August 2015, before the court could rule on the final sum of the compensation, the bank reached a confidential settlement with the American plaintiffs.
In 2018, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the Alien Tort Statute — previously implemented mostly in cases of human rights breach and extreme attacks — does not encompass individuals who are not citizens of the United States when the actions allegedly taken were not committed on American soil. In other words, non-Americans cannot use this law to sue terrorist groups in American courts. This led to the current suit by Israeli victims of terrorism, which was brought before the Jerusalem District Court. In July 2019, the court set a precedent by finding that the Palestinian Authority (PA) was responsible for 17 terrorist attacks during the second intifada (2000-2005), in which 34 Israelis were killed. The plaintiffs demanded about 1 billion shekels ($287 million) in compensation, but the final sum has yet to be determined.