Court Ruling: U.S. Terror Victims Beat DOJ in Claiming $5M of Hamas Funds

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Pajamas Media:

It’s another courtroom victory for the terror victims — this one against the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Holy Land Foundation (HLF). On April 27th, a district court in Dallas handed down a historic court decision with truly far-reaching implications. The court in Texas has found that the terror victims’ right to collect on their judgments against the terrorist groups, their front-charity organizations, and the outlaw regimes overrides the government’s right to confiscate the terrorists’ assets.

On September 4, 1997, three Hamas suicide bombers detonated themselves in the crowded Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall in downtown Jerusalem. The terror attack left five dead and 181 wounded. One of the murdered and many of those who had been seriously injured were U.S. citizens unlucky enough to be on Ben Yehuda Street when Hamas targeted this popular tourist locale. The families of the victims, represented by attorneys David Strachman and Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, filed a lawsuit in 2002 against both the government of Iran and against Hamas in federal court in Washington, D.C. Two years later, after Hamas refused to defend itself in the civil action, a judgment was entered against the Islamic terrorist group on behalf of the families in the amount of $214.5 million.

That same year, the DOJ filed an indictment against a Texas based Palestinian charity, the now infamous HLF. The U.S. alleged that the HLF was the financial arm of Hamas in America. In addition to charging its leaders with material support for terrorism and money laundering, all of the HLF’s bank accounts were frozen by the DOJ. The HLF had bank accounts in New York, New Jersey, South Carolina, Illinois, and Washington and the victims’ families immediately filed execution proceedings in all these places to satisfy, in part, their judgment against Hamas.

The DOJ, however, was not going to simply allow the victims’ families to receive their compensation. The government filed a restraining order to block the families from collecting the funds against their judgment. The U.S. attorneys argued that once the DOJ had filed its indictment against the Palestinian charity, the HLF’s assets had been forfeited to the government under the criminal forfeiture statute and the families were out of luck.