The Jerusalem District Court issued rulings earlier this month ordering the Palestinian Authority to compensate three Palestinians to the tune of some 3 million shekels ($795,000) after they were tortured by Palestinian security forces over allegations of “collaborating” with Israeli authorities to thwart terrorist attacks.
The rulings, first reported by Israel’s Walla news outlet this week, order Ramallah to pay a sum of around one million shekels ($265,611) to each victim.
Among other torture methods, the victims reportedly attested to being beaten all over their bodies with rifles, batons and electric cables, being denied sleep and access to a bathroom, being forced to drink soap and having their teeth broken. Their families’ lives were also reportedly threatened.
“It is hard to believe that the Israeli courts would recognize a defense that cooperation with Israel is an act of treason in favor of the Israeli enemy,” said District Judge Miriam Ilany in the ruling, according to the report. “In addition, those acts of ‘treason’ were intended to prevent acts of terrorism against Israel and against Israelis, which the Palestinian Authority pledged to prevent in the [Oslo] interim agreement.”
Under the terms of the Oslo Accords, which the Jewish state signed with Palestinian terror leader Yasser Arafat in the 1990s, the newly created P.A. was tasked with fighting terrorism in parts of Judea and Samaria.
According to Ilany, the P.A. “is entitled to protect its security and act against spies and collaborators, as long as this does not harm Israel’s security interests, which left security responsibility in [the P.A.’s] hands.”
The Jerusalem-based Arbus, Kedem, Tzur law firm, which represents the three Palestinians, as well as Israeli families who are suing the P.A. over its support for terrorism, called this month’s ruling “recognition of their contribution and a distinction between enemy and ally,” according to Walla.
“The events of Oct. 7 taught us about the heavy moral debt we have toward the collaborators who help us in dealing with terrorism,” Barak Kedem and Aryeh Arbus told the outlet, referring to Hamas’s cross-border terror massacre in which some 1,200 people were murdered.
Last week, Kedem won a provisional order allowing a group of Israeli families who have lost loved ones to terror to seize 160 million shekels ($42 million) in P.A. funds frozen by Jerusalem pending proceedings.
The suit marked the first action taken since Israel’s Knesset passed the “Compensation for Terror Victims Bill.” The law requires courts to award punitive damages of at least 10 million shekels ($2.66 million) per fatal casualty.
To ease the collection of the punitive awards by victims and their heirs, judgments may be enforced against “any property of the defendant, including any property seized or frozen by the State of Israel.”
The P.A. has one of the largest per capita security forces in the world, trained and armed by the United States and other Western nations. The Biden administration wants the P.A. to assume control of the Gaza Strip after the war against Hamas ends, a move that Jerusalem has so far resisted.
