The next legal front for victims of terrorism, including those affected by Hamas's October 7 massacre, may lie not only in proving who carried out an attack, but in tracing the money that made it possible.
For attorney Gideon Fisher, that is the heart of the matter.
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post on Sunday, he said his office has been handling cases involving victims of hostile acts for years and was now also representing October 7 massacre victims. In addition to using civil litigation to pursue compensation for victims and bereaved families, it is also targeting the financial infrastructure that allows terrorism to function, he added.
“Terrorism without finance [means] there is no terrorism,” Fisher said. Terrorist groups cannot survive without money, and litigation can be used not only to seek damages, but to strike at terrorism’s “economic bunker,” he said.
Since the October 7 massacre, Fisher said, his firm has been approached by more than 2,000 recognized victims of hostile acts. His office only works with people already recognized by the National Insurance Institute as victims of hostile acts, he said, adding that Israeli citizens, dual nationals, and foreign nationals who have been affected by the massacre have contacted the firm.
Fisher said his office has assembled an international team, including legal, intelligence, and financial specialists, with a particular focus on terrorist financing.
This argument has taken on added relevance after a pair of recent US court developments involving the Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestinian Authority.
Last June, the US Supreme Court ruled in Fuld v. PLO that American victims could pursue certain terrorism claims against the PA and the PLO in US courts under the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act.
The law, passed by Congress in 2019, was meant to address a problem that had dogged victims’ lawsuits for years: Even when plaintiffs won large judgments, those victories could later fall apart on the threshold question of whether US courts had the authority to hear the case.
This issue was at the center of long-running litigation brought by American victims of terrorist attacks in Jerusalem during the Second Intifada. A New York jury awarded damages in 2015, but the judgment was thrown out the following year after an appeals court found that the PA and the PLO lacked the kind of US ties needed for American courts to exercise personal jurisdiction over them, despite the gravity of the allegations.
Congress responded in 2019 by passing the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act, which was aimed at creating a clearer jurisdictional basis for certain terrorism-related suits against the PA and the PLO. The Supreme Court upheld that law last year in Fuld. Then, this spring, the Second Circuit restored the earlier $655.5 million judgment.
For Fisher, that sequence is what makes the current moment significant.
He described the combination of the 2019 statute, the Supreme Court’s ruling, and the revived judgment as a meaningful opening for victims. It is an indication that claims once thought blocked may no longer be out of reach, he said.
That does not mean every future plaintiff will automatically prevail, Fisher said. Recent rulings may have widened the courthouse door, but they did not erase the need to prove a concrete connection between a defendant and a specific act of terrorism, he said.
To establish liability, plaintiffs still have to show the linkage between those financing terrorism and those carrying it out, Fisher said. General allegations are not enough, and the burden remains highly case-specific, he added.
THAT IS especially relevant for the October 7 massacre victims.
October 7 massacre extensively documented, not necessarily enough for civil compensation claims
The Hamas massacre is extensively documented, but translating that into civil compensation claims is a different exercise entirely. Lawyers still need to identify viable defendants, draw a direct line between those defendants and particular attacks, and then locate assets that can actually be reached.
Where such a connection can be shown, litigation may be possible against the organizations involved and also against parties alleged to have financed, supported, or otherwise enabled them, Fisher said. The legal challenge is less about recounting the horrors of the attack than about tying money, actors, and responsibility together in a way a court can act on, he said.
Some of the evidence can be relatively direct, Fisher said. If an attacker explicitly identifies himself with Hamas while describing a specific killing, that might help connect both the organization and the act to the same chain of responsibility, he said.
In addition, there is extensive Arabic-language material that helps demonstrate ties between various defendants and Hamas in the lead-up to the October 7 massacre, Fisher said.
Nevertheless, even a favorable ruling is only part of the story, he said.
The broader objective is not only compensation but pressure: making it harder for those who finance terrorism to continue doing so, Fisher said. In that sense, the litigation is meant to work on two tracks at once: to provide some measure of recovery for victims, while also imposing consequences on the financial systems behind terrorism.
The harder question is what happens after judgment, he said.
This is not a theoretical problem. Fisher cited the case of Michelle Kokoi, who survived as a toddler after terrorists murdered her parents in a 2002 attack, as an example of both the promise and the difficulty of these lawsuits. Even after a court ruling, the separate battle remains the same: locating and attaching assets that can turn a judgment on paper into actual compensation, he said.
That, in turn, is why the financing issue matters so much, Fisher said.
Potential avenues can include funds seized in Israel, assets located abroad, cryptocurrency channels, and other money streams alleged to be connected to terrorist organizations or those supporting them, he said. The purpose is to pursue every lawful route available to ensure that financing terrorism carries legal consequences as well as security ones, he added.
Israeli courts have become somewhat more stable terrain for these claims, Fisher said, adding that legislation passed in 2024 set compensation levels for bereaved families and for those left seriously wounded in hostile acts, reducing at least some of the inconsistency that had previously existed between cases. That does not solve the enforcement problem, but it does create a clearer baseline, he said.
For Fisher, the significance of the current moment is not that compensation is suddenly guaranteed. It is a route that, once appearing largely blocked, may now be reopening.
If plaintiffs can show that an attacker, or the attacker’s family, received or stood to receive funding from a defendant, that may justify legal action not only in Israel but in the US as well, he said.
Recent US rulings do not promise recovery for the October 7 massacre victims and their families. What they may do is reopen a path that had narrowed for years, one that allows lawyers to test whether the same financial networks long targeted through sanctions, seizures, and intelligence work can also be pressed in civil court.
If that effort succeeds, the result may be larger than any single case: not only compensation for victims, but a new way of using the courts to go after the money behind terrorism.