US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Monday declined to pause a $655.5 million judgment against the Palestinian Authority and Palestine Liberation Organization over attacks that killed and wounded Americans in Israel during the Second Intifada.
Sotomayor rejected the emergency request without providing an explanation and without sending it to the full court. The decision allows the plaintiffs to continue trying to collect the money while the PA and PLO prepare to ask the Supreme Court to review the judgment.
“The practical meaning is that the Palestinian Authority will be required to pay $655 million to the victims of terrorism,” Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, president of Shurat HaDin-Israel Law Center, told The Jerusalem Post.
Darshan-Leitner said the plaintiffs intend to pursue tax revenues that Israel collects on the PA’s behalf, including funds Israel has frozen over payments made by the PA to Palestinian security prisoners and the families of attackers.
The funds include customs duties and other taxes that Israel collects on the PA’s behalf under the Oslo arrangements, and which the Palestinian organizations described as a central source of PA income.
Congress changed law to allow cases against PA, PLO
“The judgment will be enforced against the Palestinian Authority’s tax revenues and any other assets owned by the Palestinian Authority and the PLO,” Darshan-Leitner said.
She said other possible targets could include investment portfolios, accounts in Palestinian banks, and other financial and nonfinancial assets belonging to the organizations.
The PA and PLO had asked Sotomayor to block collection while they prepared their appeal, arguing that the judgment should not have been revived after it had previously been overturned and the original legal proceedings ended.
They also warned that collecting such a large sum could deepen the PA’s financial crisis and disrupt schools, hospitals, sanitation and security services in the West Bank. Their application said the PA had accumulated close to $5 billion in debt and argued that taking the money from tax revenues held by Israel could threaten its ability to function.
The plaintiffs dispute the suggestion that the judgment cannot be collected without causing the PA to collapse. Darshan-Leitner said the PA and PLO have several sources of money and property that could be pursued, rather than relying on a single immediate payment.
The case was brought by American victims and relatives of victims of shootings and bombings in and around Jerusalem between 2002 and 2004. The attacks killed 33 people and wounded hundreds more.
The families sued under the US Anti-Terrorism Act, which allows American victims of international terrorism to seek damages in US courts. After a seven-week trial, a New York jury found the PA and PLO civilly liable in connection with the attacks in 2015.
The jury awarded the plaintiffs $218.5 million. That amount was automatically tripled under the anti-terrorism law, bringing the total judgment to $655.5 million.
The judgment was overturned in 2016 after the Second US Circuit Court of Appeals found that American courts did not have the necessary legal authority over the PA and PLO at the time. The Supreme Court declined to take up the families’ appeal in 2018.
Congress subsequently passed the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act in 2019. The law allowed US courts to hear certain terrorism cases against the PA and PLO if the organizations carried out specified activities, including qualifying payments to attackers or their families or certain operations in the United States.
The PA and PLO argued that the law violated their constitutional rights. The Supreme Court unanimously rejected that challenge in June 2025, ruling that Congress could establish a narrow path for American victims of terrorism abroad to bring claims in US courts.
Following that decision, the Second Circuit reinstated the $655.5 million judgment on March 30. The court said reopening the case was preferable to requiring the victims to retry the same claims more than two decades after they first filed their lawsuit.
The PA and PLO now argue that the 2015 judgment had already become legally void when the earlier proceedings ended and could not simply be restored years later because Congress had since changed the law. Their planned Supreme Court appeal will focus on whether the Second Circuit had the authority to revive it.
Darshan-Leitner said the litigation had also affected the PA’s policy of making payments to prisoners and the families of attackers. The PA has said that its revised system is based on welfare needs rather than the acts for which prisoners were convicted.
Darshan-Leitner dismissed the distinction as largely semantic, but said the change showed that the PA understood the financial risks created by its payment policy.
“This semantic change will not absolve the PA of responsibility for terrorist attacks,” she said. “But it shows that it understands that the payment policy has brought judgments worth hundreds of millions of dollars against it.”
She added that the wider court rulings had opened a clearer route for American victims of terrorism to sue the PA and PLO in the United States, where anti-terrorism law provides for damages far larger than those typically awarded in Israeli proceedings.