July 18, 2007:
Attorneys for the PA had sought to argue that the PA was a state and had sovereign immunity which shielded it from civil lawsuits brought by the victims of PA sponsored terror. Although the District Court had rejected this defense and ordered the cases to go forward, the PA filed an interim appeal of the lower
court's decision.

The PA's appeal was filed in 2003. Attorneys for the terror victim families argued that the matter of the PA's status and the question of its immunity had already been decided by the Foreign Ministry, whose opinion the District Court had accepted and that the PA had no right to seek a ruling by the Supreme Court on other unripe legal issues. As such, there was no basis for the appeal and the proceedings in the District Court should be allowed to go forward.

The Supreme Court, however, stayed the lower court cases and then refused to rule on the appeal for four years! The Supreme Court repeatedly delayed scheduling the case for oral arguments and could not bring itself to actually write a decision. Throughout the long four years the case remained on the Supreme Court's docket, the Justices took every opportunity to postpone the matter, including granting the PA and State's Attorney numerous extensions of time and, thus, unjustly depriving the terror victims of their day in court. It was obvious to the terror victims and their families that the Supreme Court's ideological bias in favor of the PA factored heavily in its deliberate effort to obstruct their cases from being heard.

Today's Supreme Court ruling upheld the decision of the District Court and adopted all of the arguments of the attorneys for the terror victims. In fact, the PA's appeal could have been rejected by the Supreme Court the day after it was filed four years ago as this long-delayed decision did not contained anything that wasn't previously addressed.

Some of the cases that can now proceed involve terror attacks that were perpetrated at the very onset of the Palestinian intifada violence in 2000. These include the "lynch" of two Israeli soldiers in a Ramallah police station, the bombing of the Kfar Darom school bus and the murder of two young restaurant owners in Tulkarm.

According to lead counsel for the terror victim families, Attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner: "This is an important decision which will now allow the terror victims to have their cases heard against the Palestinian Authority. The Israeli Supreme Court has finally ruled, as other courts around the world already have ruled -- that the PA must face trial for its involvement in terror. There was no legal reason and certainly no moral reason to delay the cases for four years. The families of the "Ramallah Lynch" victims and other innocent Israeli victims of Palestinian terror will now be able to receive a measure of justice from the ones who devastated their lives."