The Palestinian Authority and the perpetrators of a terrorist attack in which three Israeli Jews were murdered on Road 443 will pay NIS 62 million to the families of those murdered, Judge Moshe Drori has ruled in the Jerusalem District Court.
The case concerned a shooting attack at the beginning of the last Palestinian intifada on Saturday night, August 25, 2001. The claimants were travelling in a car on Road 443, returning from a trip to Eilat to their home in central Israel. A car in which the attackers - Ahmed Taleb Mustafa Barghouti, Muhamad Rahman Salam Mazalah, Husam Akel Rajab Shahada, Haitham Al-Motafek Hamadan, Fares Sadek Muhamad A'anam, and Ali Alian - were travelling drew alongside the claimants' vehicle.
The attackers opened fire from within their vehicle and killed the three adults in the other vehicle: Sharon Ben-Shalom, her husband Yaniv Ben-Shalom, and her brother Doron Sviri. Two infants who were in the car, Efrat Ben-Shalom and Shahar Ben-Shalom, were saved because their mother, Sharon Ben-Shalom, protected them with her body and was shot in the back. The two orphans have since then been raised by their mother's sister and her husband, Odelia Moshe Ben-Shalom and Atzmon Moshe.
The ruling in which damages were set follows on from a decision by Judge Drori in September 2014 that the perpetrators of the shooting had responsibility under the law of torts towards the claimants, and that the Palestinian Authority was also responsible, both for having induced and assisted the perpetrators to carry out the attack and on the count of negligence for having supplied the weapons used in the attack, and because of the financial support given to the perpetrators.
The judge's ruling contains a full description of the physical and psychological harm to all the victims' relatives, including the parents of those killed. Particularly moving were the letters that the orphans wrote each year on the anniversary of their parents' murder. The judge took into account various considerations in setting the level of damages, and in the end ruled that there were grounds for imposing penal damages of NIS 10 million to the estates of each of the murder victims, NIS 6 million to each of the orphans, and NIS 5 million each to the murder victims' parents.
Since there is a distinction between the liability of the perpetrators of the attack and the vicarious and other liabilities of the Palestinian Authority, the judge ruled that of the total damages of NIS 62 million, the Palestinian Authority should pay 40%, or NIS 24.8 million, and the perpetrators 60%, or NIS 37.2 million. He also ruled that the respondents should pay the claimant's legal costs in the same proportions, at 20% of the damages set.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on November 19, 2017
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