The next legal front for victims of terrorism, including those affected by Hamas’s October 7 massacre, may lie not only in proving who carried out an attack, but in tracing the money that made it possible.
For attorney Gideon Fisher, that is the heart of the matter.
In a Sunday interview with The Jerusalem Post, Fisher said that after years of handling cases involving victims of hostile acts, his office is now representing October 7 victims as well and seeking to use civil litigation not only to pursue compensation for victims and bereaved families, but also to target the financial infrastructure that allows terrorism to function.
“Terror without finance, there is no terror,” Fisher said. Terror groups, he argued, cannot survive without money, and litigation can be used not only to seek damages, but to strike at what he described as terror’s “economic bunker.”
Fisher, a veteran litigator whose office has long handled claims involving victims of hostile acts in Israel and abroad, said that since October 7, his firm has been approached by more than 2,000 recognized victims of hostile acts.
He said the office works only with people already recognized by the National Insurance Institute as victims of hostile acts, and that among those who turned to the firm are Israeli citizens, dual nationals, and foreign nationals affected by the massacre.
According to Fisher, his office assembled an international team after the attack, including legal, intelligence, and financial specialists, with a particular focus on terrorist financing.
That argument has taken on added relevance after a pair of recent US court developments involving the Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestinian Authority.
In June 2025, the US Supreme Court ruled in Fuld v. PLO that American victims could pursue certain terrorism claims against the PA and PLO in US courts under the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act.
The law, passed by Congress in 2019, was meant to address a problem that had dogged victims’ lawsuits for years: even where plaintiffs won large judgments, those victories could later fall apart on the threshold question of whether US courts had authority to hear the case at all.
That issue sat at the center of the long-running litigation brought by American victims of attacks carried out in Jerusalem during the Second Intifada. A New York jury awarded damages in 2015, but the judgment was thrown out the following year after an appeals court found that, however grave the allegations, the PA and PLO lacked the kind of US ties needed for American courts to exercise personal jurisdiction over them.
Congress responded in 2019 by passing the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act, aimed at creating a clearer jurisdictional basis for certain terror-related suits against the PA and PLO. The Supreme Court upheld that law last year in Fuld. Then, this spring, the Second Circuit restored the earlier $655.5 million judgment.
For Fisher, that sequence is what makes the current moment significant.
He described the combination of the 2019 statute, the Supreme Court’s ruling, and the revived judgment as a meaningful opening for victims - a sign, he said, that claims once thought blocked may no longer be out of reach.
That does not mean every future plaintiff will automatically prevail, and Fisher was careful on that point, too. Recent rulings may have widened the courthouse door, but they did not erase the need to prove a concrete connection between a defendant and a specific act of terror.
To establish liability, he said, plaintiffs still have to show the “linkage” between those financing terrorism and those carrying it out. General allegations are not enough; the burden remains highly case-specific.
That is especially relevant for the October 7 victims.
October 7 massacre extensively documented, not necessarily enough for civil compensation claims
The massacre itself is extensively documented. But translating that into civil compensation claims is a different exercise entirely. Lawyers still need to identify viable defendants, draw a direct line between those defendants and particular attacks, and then locate assets that can actually be reached.
Fisher said that where such a connection can be shown, litigation may be possible not only against the direct organizations involved, but also against parties alleged to have financed, supported, or otherwise enabled them. The legal challenge, as he described it, is less about recounting the horrors of the attack than about tying money, actors, and responsibility together in a way a court can act on.
As for what that evidence might look like, Fisher said some of it can be relatively direct. If an attacker explicitly identifies himself with Hamas while describing a specific killing, he said, that may help connect both the organization and the act to the same chain of responsibility. Beyond that, he said, there is extensive Arabic-language material that, in his view, helps illuminate ties between various defendants and Hamas in the lead-up to October 7.
Still, even a favorable ruling is only part of the story.
Fisher said the broader objective is not only compensation, but pressure: making it harder for those who finance terror to continue doing so. In that sense, the litigation is meant to work on two tracks at once - to provide some measure of recovery for victims, while also imposing consequences on the financial systems behind terrorism.
The harder question is what happens after judgment.
That problem is not theoretical. Fisher pointed to the case of Michelle Kokoi, who survived as a toddler after terrorists murdered her parents in a 2002 attack, as an example of both the promise and the difficulty of these lawsuits. Even after a court ruling, he said, the separate battle remains the same: locating and attaching assets that can turn a judgment on paper into actual compensation.
That, in turn, is why the financing issue matters so much.
According to Fisher, potential avenues can include funds seized in Israel, assets located abroad, cryptocurrency channels, and other money streams alleged to be connected to terrorist organizations or those supporting them. The purpose, he said, is to pursue every lawful route available to ensure that financing terrorism carries legal consequences as well as security ones.
He also argued that the courts in Israel have become somewhat more stable terrain for these claims. Fisher noted that legislation passed in 2024 set compensation levels for bereaved families and for those left seriously injured in hostile acts, reducing at least some of the inconsistency that had previously existed between cases. That does not solve the enforcement problem, but it does create a clearer baseline.
For Fisher, the significance of the current moment is not that compensation is suddenly guaranteed. It is a route that, once appearing largely blocked, but may now be reopening.
If plaintiffs can show that an attacker, or the attacker’s family, received or stood to receive funding from a defendant, he said, that may justify legal action not only in Israel but in the United States as well.
For the October 7 victims and their families, recent US rulings do not promise recovery. What they may do is reopen a path that had narrowed for years - one that allows lawyers to test whether the same financial networks long targeted through sanctions, seizures, and intelligence work can also be pressed in civil court.
And if that effort succeeds, the result may be larger than any single case: not only compensation for victims, but a new way of using the courts to go after the money behind terrorism.