The Media Line: A $655 Million Judgment Against the PA Reopens the Long Fight for Justice for US Victims of the Second Intifada 

A $655 Million Judgment Against the PA Reopens the Long Fight for Justice for US Victims of the Second Intifada 

A federal appeals court has reinstated a $655.5 million judgment against the Palestinian Authority and PLO, more than two decades after American families sued over attacks from the Second Intifada 

By Gabriel Colodro/The Media Line  

Alan Bauer was not thinking about litigation when he picked his son up from a Jerusalem sidewalk in March 2002. He was thinking about whether the boy was alive.  

A Palestinian suicide bomber had detonated behind them on King George Street. Bauer had been walking home with his seven-year-old son after a day that began with a doctor’s appointment and ended at his office. The blast threw him forward. When he turned around, the child who had been holding his hand was gone.  

“We were hand in hand a minute ago, a second ago,” Bauer told The Media Line. “Anyway, I turn around, and I don’t see him.”  

Bauer found him face down on the pavement. Both survived, but his son suffered a serious head injury and later required emergency surgery and rehabilitation. Bauer was wounded by shrapnel in his arm. More than two decades later, the attack has returned to the center of a US courtroom fight after a federal appeals court reinstated a $655.5 million judgment against the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).  

For Bauer, the ruling is not only about compensation. It is about forcing a legal and political reckoning with what he says was a PA-linked attack carried out not by an outside faction, but by people connected to the PA’s own security and political apparatus. “The entire attack was Palestinian Authority people,” Bauer said. “It wasn’t Hamas, it wasn’t Islamic Jihad. These were people who were formally paid by the Palestinian Authority.”  

The victims first won the case in 2015, when a New York jury found the PA and PLO liable and awarded $655.5 million in damages to American families harmed in attacks during the Second Intifada. But that ruling was later thrown out on appeal, not because the evidence at trial was rejected, but because the court said that US courts lacked personal jurisdiction over the PA and PLO.  

That changed after Congress amended the law and the US Supreme Court upheld the new jurisdictional framework. In March, the Second Circuit reinstated the original judgment, putting the $655.5 million verdict back in force. The victims have not yet collected the money, leaving enforcement as the next stage of the fight.  

Bauer said, for him, the legal battle began months after the bombing, when he read Israeli reporting based on military indictments that detailed who was involved in the attack. “The bomber, as I mentioned, was a policeman,” Bauer said. “The one who sent him was an intelligence agent. The bomb itself actually came from the Intelligence Bureau of the Palestinian Authority.”  

He also alleged that senior Palestinian figures were connected to the attack’s support network. Marwan Barghouti, he said, provided money shortly before the bombing. Bauer also said Hussein al-Sheikh, now a senior PA official, was named by those involved as having provided money and weapons and as having written the letter of responsibility for the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades after the attack.  

The lawsuit was filed in 2004 on behalf of American families affected by seven attacks. According to Bauer, 11 families were originally part of the suit, though one was later removed before trial. Discovery did not begin until 2014, and the case reached trial the following year. “We won completely,” Bauer said. “All 24 counts, they were found guilty. “There was a large judgment, tripled … $655.5 million.” 

The victory did not last. In 2016, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the verdict on jurisdictional grounds, finding that US courts lacked personal jurisdiction over the PA and PLO. Bauer said the victims found themselves “lost in space,” not because the facts had been rejected, but because the Palestinian defendants argued they were not sufficiently present in the United States. “They said the Palestinian Authority is not at home,” he said. “They don’t have, there’s no jurisdiction over them because they don’t have enough of a presence in the US.”  

That jurisdiction fight pushed the case out of the courts and into Congress. Lawmakers first tried to solve the problem by tying US jurisdiction to the PA’s acceptance of American aid, but Bauer said the Palestinians avoided that trigger by refusing the money. Congress then took a different route, focusing on the PA’s payments to terrorists who had killed or wounded American citizens.  

Under that law, the PA was given 120 days to stop the payments or be treated as having consented to US jurisdiction. “The law was signed by President Donald Trump, went into 2019, became the law, 120 days passed, and they kept paying the terrorists,” Bauer said. “But they can’t stop paying the terrorists.”  

The issue eventually reached the US Supreme Court. Bauer said the Biden administration’s Department of Justice came in on the victims’ side, arguing that the law was constitutional, and that President Trump’s administration maintained that position before the court. The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in favor of the legal framework, sending the case back to the lower courts. “The Department of Justice under Biden came on our side,” Bauer said. “The Trump administration, they continued being on our side. And the Supreme Court heard our case, with the US arguing with our lawyer, Kent Yalowitz. And we won 9-0.”  

When the case returned to the Second Circuit, Bauer said the court had two choices: revive the old verdict or send the victims back to trial. “Either a new trial, which nobody on our side wanted, it would be more flying back and forth, going through the whole process again, or to return the verdict,” he said. “So a month ago, approximately, the Second Circuit, 3-0, they returned the verdict.”  

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, founder of Shurat HaDin, the Israel Law Center, told The Media Line that the reinstated judgment was the result of a legal fight that lasted more than two decades and required not only courtroom persistence but legislative changes in Washington. “Now we have a final judgment against the Palestinian Authority for $655 million after 22 years of litigation.  

Darshan-Leitner said the PA’s defense was that the attackers may have been on its payroll, but had acted on their own. “They said, ‘Indeed they were our employees, but they were rogue employees,’” she said. “’They did the attacks after work hours. It wasn’t our policy to kill Israelis. We were against killing Jews.’”  

But Darshan-Leitner said that argument collapsed when placed against the PA’s ongoing payments to imprisoned terrorists and families of attackers. “If they were wrong employees, how do we keep paying their salary until today?” she said, describing the argument her side made before the jury. “You promote them in rank every three years, you pay stipends to the families of the suicide bombers, you call town squares and streets in the name of the suicide bombers. This is not how you treat wrong employees.”  

The case now moves into the question of collection. Darshan-Leitner said the PA and PLO have assets and revenue streams that can be pursued, including a PLO mission building in New York, tax revenues held by Israel on behalf of the PA, Palestinian bank accounts, and investment funds. “First of all, they do have the money,” she said. “But let’s say they will come and say they don’t have the money. We are going to demand from the State Department to enforce the judgment.”  

She said the judgment could also be paid over time. “If they cannot pay it all at once, we can do it over payments,” Darshan-Leitner said. “Monthly payments of $20 million a month will not bankrupt the Palestinian Authority. This is what we did in previous cases against the Palestinian Authority.”  

Darshan-Leitner said her broader goal is not only compensation for victims, but pressure on the systems that finance and reward terrorism. “We go after the deep pockets, because we want to, not only to get the money for the victims, but we want to influence,” she said. “I don’t believe you can influence a terrorist that goes with a mission to kill someone.”  

Bauer described the case in similar terms. He said the years of litigation exposed what he considers a false distinction often made in Western diplomacy between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. “One of the canards of the Intifada was ‘Hamas is bad and the Palestinian Authority is good,’” Bauer said. “’The Hamas guys, they’re crazy. They’re murderers. They’re exploding terrorists. The PA, they want peace.’ And unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.”  

He said the PA and Hamas have different structures and ideologies, but that both have used violence against Israelis and Jews. “They’re both terrorist organizations,” Bauer said. “Each has its own goals. Sometimes they work together. Sometimes they hate each other.”  

For Bauer, the issue remains current because several Palestinian figures linked in his view to Second Intifada violence are still treated internationally as political actors. He pointed especially to Barghouti, whose release has been demanded by supporters who portray him as a future Palestinian leader. “He’s never said, ‘I will never be involved in another terror attack,’” Bauer said. “’I apologize to all those whom I harmed.’”  

The case also highlights an uneasy record of US involvement. Bauer said Congress was consistently supportive of terror victims and that the Justice Department eventually backed the plaintiffs before the Supreme Court. But he sharply criticized the State Department, saying it had repeatedly been more concerned about the stability of the PA than about enforcing a judgment for American victims.  

“The Congress always was very supportive,” Bauer said. “The laws were passed. President Trump signed them. The Department of Justice has always been very supportive of terror victims and anything to help hold terror groups responsible. The Department of State has, let’s say, been more reticent on the good times, actually opposed to us and the bad times.”  

The Palestinian Authority has said in recent years that it has changed or canceled its formal prisoner payment law. Darshan-Leitner said courts should not accept that claim without proof. “In my current cases, they come and say we canceled the law, we don’t have this policy anymore, but the court doesn’t take their word,” she said. “The court asks them to prove that they don’t pay the terrorists.”  

Asked whether they continue paying, she answered: “Yes, yes, yes, they keep paying.”  

She said new cases filed after October 7 will test those claims directly, because the PA will have to show whether its payment system has truly changed or whether it has only been rebranded as welfare or social support. That question has become more than a legal dispute. It goes to the heart of whether the PA can still be presented internationally as a reformed governing body while victims argue in court that its own structures rewarded the violence that injured them.  

For Bauer, the judgment comes after a personal process that began with survival, not lawsuits. In the weeks after the bombing, his family’s focus was simply getting through each day. His son was initially blind and unable to move his left side, Bauer said, though his vision and movement later returned. The boy went through physical therapy, hydrotherapy, electrotherapy, and other rehabilitation. “Thank God his vision came back, as did his motion on his left side,” Bauer said. “This day, over 20 years later, he still limps a little bit.”  

Bauer himself wrote a memoir the year after the bombing, describing how the attack took only seconds but altered every part of family life. In the interview, he put it more directly. “At that point, we started a completely new life,” he said. “Up to that point, we had one life. And that ended. You close the book, seal it.”  

Now, after 22 years in court, Bauer said the verdict gives the law “teeth,” especially for American victims harmed abroad. “You can’t hold al-Qaida. Al-Qaida has no representative,” he said. “But something like the Palestinian Authority that specifically does have an office in New York with the UN, they have facilities also in Washington. They can’t run away anymore.”  

The PA and PLO may still seek further review. But Bauer said the plaintiffs have already endured the trial, the appeal, the legislative fight, the Supreme Court, and the return to the Second Circuit. “Our lawyer joked for the Supreme Court that our lawsuit could have already gone to law school,” Bauer said. “By the time it reached them.”  

For Darshan-Leitner, the reinstated verdict is part of a wider legal strategy: follow the money, force institutions to account for the attacks they enabled, and treat financial infrastructure as part of the machinery of terrorism. “The one who sent him has to pay,” she said. “I’m not going after the individuals. I want to direct the other one that I want to find responsible.”  

For Bauer, the case has returned to where he and the other plaintiffs stood in 2015: with a judgment in hand, but still waiting for payment. After 22 years of litigation, he said the ruling gives the law “teeth.” What remains is whether the Palestinian Authority and PLO will be made to pay it.  

 

 

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