The Jerusalem District Court handed down a precedent-setting ruling July 8 holding the Palestinian Authority (PA) responsible for acts of terror, even those perpetrated by Islamic Jihad or Hamas. The ruling was issued in the case of 17 claims for damages brought against the PA by families of Israeli victims of terror attacks over the past 20 years. The families were represented by attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, founder of Shurat HaDin, a nongovernmental organization that conducts massive lawsuits against terror organizations.

The first lawsuit was brought by the family of a soldier, Vadim Nurzhitz, who was beaten to death in October 2000 by an enraged Palestinian mob after wandering, by mistake, with another soldier, Yossi Avrahami, into the Palestinian city of Ramallah. Palestinian police took the two soldiers to a local police station, where crowds murdered them in cold blood and then abused their bodies. The lynching, documented by an Italian TV cameraman, generated widespread shock in Israel and abroad and was considered a catalyst of the second intifada, the five-year (2000 to 2005) Palestinian uprising against Israel that resulted in the loss of some 1,050 Israeli and over 3,000 Palestinian lives.

An additional claim for damages was brought by the Gavish family. The parents, grandfather and grandson were murdered by a terrorist who infiltrated their home in the settlement of Alon Moreh in 2002. The family of Yosef and Hana Dickstein, murdered along with their young son in a 2002 shooting attack in the southern Hebron Hills, was also a claimant. Other claimants include some 60 Israeli tour guides who alleged that their livelihood was hurt by the second intifada. All the claims were combined into one lawsuit due to their precedent-setting nature, adding up to over 1 billion shekels ($280 million) in total.