The PLO Bankrolled October 7's Butchers. Bill Them for It.

I spend my career tracing where judgment-debtor money sits and whether a court order actually gets collected. So, when Justice Sonia Sotomayor refused Monday to freeze a $655.5 million terrorism judgment against the Palestinian Authority and the PLO, my first thought was about October 7, and why the same legal weapon that just worked hasn't been aimed at that atrocity yet.

Sotomayor's one-line denial lets a Southern District of New York jury verdict finally move toward collection, 22 years after Americans were murdered and maimed in Jerusalem-area shootings and bombings. A 2015 jury awarded $218.5 million; federal law tripled it. The PA and PLO spent a decade getting the judgment vacated on jurisdictional grounds, until Congress passed a 2019 law tying U.S. jurisdiction to specific Palestinian conduct, and the Supreme Court upheld it 9-0 last year in Fuld v. PLO. That statute is now a functioning weapon. It's time to point it at Oct. 7.

Here's the case New York families deserve to bring. Hamas murdered 1,200 people on Oct. 7, 2023, including 46 Americans, the deadliest day for U.S. citizens at terrorist hands since 9/11. Everyone knows Hamas ran the attack, not the PA. What almost nobody talks about is what the PLO's own payroll office did next.

The PLO's Commission of Prisoners publicly announced that families of 1,500 Hamas fighters who took part in the Oct. 7 invasion qualified for a lump-sum grant plus a monthly stipend for life. By early 2024, the PA had added 661 Hamas operatives captured during the war to its paid prisoner rolls, on top of thousands already collecting. This isn't a rumor — it's on the PA's own Prisoners' Club channel and in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, its official daily newspaper. The PLO put a price on Oct. 7's perpetrators and paid it. It already spent over $30 million a month on these stipends before the war, under a law mandating 7 percent of its budget go to the fund. This isn't a bystander writing occasional checks — it's a running payroll system for terrorism, and Oct. 7's attackers are now on it.

That's not incidental. It's the exact conduct Congress built the 2019 statute around: payments to individuals designated as terrorists, made because of their terrorism. The PSJVTA doesn't require the PA to have planned an attack — it requires money moving to the people who carried it out, or their families, after the fact. On Oct. 7, the PLO's own institutions supplied that money, in public, to attackers who murdered Americans.

I've built enough cases on paper trails to know how rare this one is. Terror-finance litigation usually runs into the wall of proving who funded what through cutouts and shell accounts jurisdictions removed. Here, the PA published its own beneficiary numbers in its own state newspaper. And the collection target is already in plain view: the indirect Palestinian tax revenue Israel collects and holds on the PA's behalf, the same stream plaintiffs in the 2002-2004 case intend to pursue now that Sotomayor has cleared the way. An Oct. 7 judgment wouldn't need a new enforcement theory — just the one already proven to work.

That distinction matters, because the other Oct. 7 suits are already hitting the wall I navigate for a living: a judgment isn't money until someone finds an asset to seize. A $1 billion suit against Iran and a $7 billion suit against Hamas's alleged architects both face defendants with no real U.S. footprint to attach. A $1 billion suit against UNRWA was tossed on immunity grounds this fall, despite the Justice Department's own view otherwise. The PA and PLO carry no such shield. Their money isn't hidden in Tehran — it's tax revenue Israel already holds, with their name on it.

To be sure, the PA and Hamas are rivals, not partners — Hamas threw the PA out of Gaza by force in 2007. Some will say that makes the PA's payments to Hamas families reflexive Palestinian solidarity, not liability-creating conduct. I'd ask them to explain the difference to a Long Island family whose son died at the Nova festival. The statute doesn't ask who's friends with whom. It asks who wrote the check, and the check cleared.

New York was the forum for the 2002-2004 case because the plaintiffs sued in the Southern District. New York is home to Americans killed and taken hostage on Oct. 7, too. The legal infrastructure victims' lawyers spent two decades building is sitting there, tested and now producing a collectible judgment. It shouldn't take another 22 years to use it on this one.

Accountability isn't a one-time event. It's a standing invoice. Monday's ruling proved the PA and PLO can be made to pay for what their money financed once courts stop letting them stall. The next invoice, for Oct. 7, should already be in the mail.

Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.

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