The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has reinstated a $655.5 million judgment entered on a 2015 jury verdict against the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority in a long-running case brought by American victims of attacks in Israel during the Second Intifada.
A federal jury in Manhattan in 2015 found the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Palestinian Authority (PA) liable under the federal Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) for six attacks in Israel that killed or wounded U.S. citizens. The jury awarded $218.5 million, which was automatically trebled under the ATA to $655.5 million.
In August 2016, a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit vacated the judgment, holding that U.S. courts lacked personal jurisdiction over the PLO and PA.
Congress later enacted the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act (PSJVTA) in December 2019. The statute names the PLO and PA and provides that they “shall be deemed to have consented” to personal jurisdiction in certain ATA suits if they engage in specified conduct, including making payments to individuals imprisoned for terrorist acts or to families of deceased terrorists.
The Second Circuit subsequently concluded that the PSJVTA’s “deemed consent” provisions could not constitutionally supply personal jurisdiction over the PLO and PA. But in June 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reversed in Fuld v. Palestine Liberation Organization, upholding the PSJVTA’s personal-jurisdiction framework as consistent with the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause and emphasizing that the statute ties jurisdiction to conduct involving the United States and to foreign-policy and national-security considerations traditionally left to the political branches.
In its latest ruling, the Second Circuit reinstated the $655.5 million judgment and rejected the defendants’ request for a new trial. The court said the district court did not commit a reversible error in admitting expert testimony about the organizations’ structure and operations, and it emphasized the interest in finality after decades of litigation. The panel also noted that some plaintiffs have since died or are in poor health, a factor it said weighed against reopening the trial.
The decision leaves in place the 2015 verdict holding the PLO and PA civilly liable to American victims for the attacks at issue in the case.
