Shurat HaDin President Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, working on behalf of the families of the victims of terror attacks perpetrated by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), has served notice to the philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation that because of their significant financial donations to two organizations Israel’s Defense Minister has designated as terrorist organizations, they face punitive exposure in legal action in both Israeli and American courts.
The legal letter was submitted on behalf of the relatives of Ehud and Ruth Fogel, who were murdered along with three of their children—Yoav, Elad, and Hadas—in Itamar in 2011, as well as the family of Rina Shnerb, a teenage girl who was killed by a roadside bomb in 2019 as she was hiking with her father.
Shurat HaDin’s investigators have discovered that the Rockefeller Foundation has, in the past two years, donated $100,000 to the International Children’s Protection Organization Palestine, in addition to a commitment to provide more than $800,000 in funding to al-Haq, a PFLP front, by 2023.
Both groups are among the six organizations identified by Defense Minister Benny Gantz as affiliated with—and working on behalf of—the PFLP, one of the world’s oldest and most lethal terror factions responsible for numerous hijackings, massacres, and bombings since 1968.
The letter that was sent to the Rockefeller Foundation warned that the continued funding of terror organizations and their affiliates is clearly defined by law as aiding and abetting terrorism. Any assistance to said groups exposes the benefactor to huge claims of damages on the part of the victims of terror.
“It is not possible for philanthropic foundations around the world to regularly inject funds into seemingly innocent Palestinian organizations but that are linked to catastrophic terrorist attacks against Israelis,” Nitsana Darshan-Leitner stated. “Those who float money to groups that are connected to terror must be held to account for the murder, misery, and suffering their funding has paid for.”