The Anti-Terrorism Act doesn’t have a press exemption. It shouldn’t.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists murdered, raped, and abducted civilians in southern Israel. The lawsuit I filed in U.S. federal court alleges that some of Al Jazeera’s contributors did not arrive after the attack. They arrived with the attackers.
I have spent twenty-three years filing lawsuits against the infrastructure that keeps terror organizations alive. Banks. States. Charities. Cryptocurrency exchanges. Social media platforms. My organization, Shurat HaDin, has sued Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Palestinian Authority, Iran, Syria, North Korea, and a long list of Arab, European, Chinese, and Lebanese banks, alongside Twitter, Google, and Facebook.
In February 2025, Shurat HaDin, in partnership with StandWithUs, filed suit against the Al Jazeera Media Network in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The case seeks $1 billion in damages on behalf of October 7 victims and their families, brought under the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Act.
The legal theory is straightforward.
The Anti-Terrorism Act prohibits providing material support or services to designated foreign terrorist organizations. It applies to banks. It applies to charities. It applies to web platforms. There is no carve-out for entities that call themselves journalists.
What our complaint alleges Al Jazeera did is not journalism. It is operational support.
The complaint alleges that the network knowingly maintained terrorists on its payroll and paid for guest appearances at its conferences, which included terrorists as speakers. It alleges that Al Jazeera employed Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives as journalists, some of whom were directly involved in the October 7 attack, and that it broadcast exclusive interviews with Hamas leaders who carried out attacks against Israeli and American civilians.
The network’s journalists have, at times, embedded with terrorists as they conducted attacks.
This is not a theoretical concern. In June 2024, the Tel Aviv-Jaffa District Court found a “direct and causal connection” between consumption of Al Jazeera content and terror attacks in Israel.
A media organization that knowingly maintains designated terrorists on its payroll is not a press institution. It is a vendor of services to a designated terrorist group. The Anti-Terrorism Act is the correct instrument.
No modern terror organization survives without a media arm.
Hamas does not need only guns and tunnels. It needs broadcasters willing to launder its propaganda, conceal its operatives behind press credentials, and convert civilian massacres into political legitimacy for a global audience. The strategic value of that media layer is not abstract. It is the difference between a designated terror group being treated as a legitimate political actor or as the criminal enterprise it is.
We will not allow that distinction to be erased.
The Al Jazeera case is part of a wider campaign Shurat HaDin has built since October 7. We are suing the Palestinian Authority, which transfers roughly $1 billion a year to Hamas. We are suing Iran. We have sued Binance. We have sued the Qatari charity foundations. We have filed against UNRWA, the Red Cross, and Students for Justice in Palestine.
In August 2025, we filed a NIS 20 million lawsuit against Karim Khan, the suspended prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, on behalf of the families of hostages Avinatan Or, Eitan Mor, and Omri Miran. We have a complaint before the ICC against Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez over the alleged transfer of dual-use explosive-related components to Iran during 2024–2025.
Each of those filings rests on the same operating principle: terror is sustained by an infrastructure of money, materiel, and message. Cut the infrastructure, and you collapse the operation.
Litigation does what diplomacy will not and what military operations cannot.
In 2015, a New York jury issued a $655 million judgment in Shurat HaDin’s favor, finding the Palestinian Authority responsible for twenty-four acts of terrorism. That number sent a message every defendant in the years since has tried to ignore. We will continue to make them confront it.
I am often asked whether civil litigation can actually defeat terror. My answer is that it already has — quietly, in the form of frozen assets, bankrupted financiers, withdrawn services, and policies adopted by banks and platforms that no longer want to absorb the legal cost of being a terror conduit.
Litigation does what diplomacy will not and what military operations cannot. It assigns a price to participation. It makes the cost visible. It hands victims a weapon their governments often refuse to lend them.
Al Jazeera is not exempt from that price. No media outlet that knowingly enables a designated terrorist group should be.
We intend to win.
The case is on the docket. The plaintiffs are real. The statute is clear.
We intend to win.
Nitsana Darshan-Leitner is the founder and president of Shurat HaDin – Israel Law Center, the Tel Aviv–based civil rights organization she founded in 2003. Her firm has represented hundreds of terror victims in actions against terror organizations, their state sponsors, and the institutions that materially support them.
