Some 200 American family members of Oct. 7 victims filed a lawsuit in D.C. federal court on Monday against Bashar Masri, a Palestinian-American billionaire with ties to the Trump administration who, they allege, aided and abetted Hamas in carrying out the attack.
The suit accuses Masri of knowingly working with Hamas in developing business properties in Gaza that concealed and provided electricity to the terror group’s elaborate, militarized tunnel network. It seeks damages under the Anti-Terrorism Act.
Masri has also provided advice and private plane travel to Adam Boehler, formerly U.S. President Donald Trump’s nominee to be special presidential envoy for hostage affairs and a current special envoy at the U.S. State Department, as he conducted unprecedented direct negotiations with Hamas in March, per Israeli media reports.
As chairman of the Palestine Development & Investment Company, Masri struck deals to develop and operate hotels, an industrial park and other businesses in Gaza, including directly with Hamas officials, according to the suit and statements from the company’s website.
Those businesses included Al Mashtal Hotel, which the Israel Defense Forces identified in 2014 as a Hamas rocket launch site and which the suit alleges was refurbished by Masri’s company in contract with a Hamas-affiliated construction company. The suit also alleges that Hamas used the hotel in terrorist operations before, on and after Oct. 7.
Gary Osen, one of the lead attorneys representing the families against Masri, told JNS that this cycle of repeatedly re-investing in properties used by Hamas represented a “continuous pattern” of complicity with the terrorist group on the part of Masri and the other defendants.
“When the hotels get damaged by Israeli airstrikes or the Gaza Industrial Estate gets damaged, they not only don’t stop investing, they continue to rebuild infrastructure,” Osen said. “If someone didn’t want to be involved with Hamas or support them, they would presumably say, ‘Okay, well, they’re firing rockets from Al Mashtal hotel tunnels, maybe we should just exit that investment.’”
“But no, according to the complaint, they not only go back and refurbish, invest more money and more of other people’s money, but assist Hamas with its tunnels again,” Osen said. “Nothing changes.”
Masri’s office denied the allegations in a statement to JNS and said he would seek their dismissal in court.
“Bashar Masri is a successful and respected Palestinian American entrepreneur and business leader,” the statement said. “He was shocked to learn through the media that a baseless complaint was filed today referring to false allegations against him and certain businesses he is associated with. Neither he nor those entities have ever engaged in unlawful activity or provided support for violence and militancy.”
“Bashar Masri has been involved in development and humanitarian work for the past decades,” the statement added. “His continued efforts to promote regional peace and stability have been widely recognized by the United States and all concerned parties in the region. He unequivocally opposes violence of any kind.”
Masri was born in Nablus to a prominent and wealthy family of Palestinian businessmen and was educated in Egypt and the United States, graduating from Virginia Tech and eventually becoming a U.S. citizen. In the mid-1990s, he returned to Ramallah and founded a variety of business ventures.
Through his company and investments in or control of other entities, Masri runs or has stakes in some of the largest Palestinian companies, with market caps of hundreds of millions of dollars on the Nablus-based Palestine Exchange stock market.
In 2018, Fortune magazine listed him as no. 38 on its list of the world’s greatest leaders, and he sits on the Dean’s Council of Harvard Kennedy School.
Osen told JNS that Masri’s dealings with Hamas officials in the leadup to Oct. 7 cannot be squared with how he presents himself to the world as a legitimate Palestinian businessman.
“It’s just hard to wrap your mind around the degree to which the owners of the properties were complicit,” Osen said. “The fact that Masri was allegedly in Gaza three weeks before Oct. 7, promoting his green tech at the hotel, presenting himself and his companies as saving the environment and helping Palestinians get regular electricity—meanwhile, some of the solar electricity is going into the Hamas tunnels.”
“In my view, there’s a level of duplicity in all this that can’t be reconciled with that outward persona of moderation,” he said.
Masri’s alleged direct dealings with Hamas include a $60 million solar energy project in Gaza that his company announced in September 2023 and a 2022 agreement with Abdel Fattah Zrai’i, Hamas’s deputy minister of economy.
The IDF killed Zrai’i in 2024 airstrike and said that he had served in Hamas’s weapons manufacturing division and had played a role in seizing humanitarian aid.
It’s not clear how Masri became connected with the Trump envoy Boehler, though Masri has extensive business dealings with Qatar, including a nearly $1 billion Qatari investment in one of Masri’s real estate developments north of Ramallah.
JNS asked the State Department before the lawsuit was filed for details about Masri’s associations with Boehler, including the private jet travel and whether he had advised any other administration officials.
“We work closely with partners and third-party intermediaries in our efforts to free Americans detained overseas,” a spokesperson for the department told JNS. “We don’t have further details to share about special envoy Boehler’s travel.”
U.S. President Donald Trump nominated Boehler to be special presidential envoy for hostage affairs in January, but Boehler’s nomination was withdrawn after the negotiations with Hamas in March. He remains a special envoy at the State Department.
In a social media post in December before he took office, Trump described Boehler as one of the lead negotiators of the Abraham Accords that normalized relations between Israel and several Arab countries.
Boehler was also college roommates with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and was chief executive officer of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, a federal agency, in the first Trump administration. In 2020, Boehler announced that Masri would serve on the Development Finance Corporation’s advisory council, a position Masri held until 2023.
JNS sought comment from the State Department about the lawsuit after it was filed on Monday morning.
One of the allegations in the lawsuit is that for decades, Masri used funding from the U.S. government and from U.S.-backed international organizations intended for economic development and diverted the money to support Hamas’s terrorist infrastructure.
“The Gaza Industrial Estate, one of the key Masri-controlled sites implicated in this lawsuit, was originally funded as a USAID initiative to promote economic growth in the region,” the plaintiffs stated.
“However, evidence in the complaint suggests that while the GIE housed legitimate businesses, it also became a crucial Hamas operations hub, with its underground attack tunnels burrowed under the border with Israel to allow Hamas to attack a nearby kibbutz and seize hostages,” they state.
One of the plaintiffs, Naomi Feifer-Weiser, the mother of Roey Weiser, an off-duty commander at the Erez Crossing who was killed after drawing fire away from trapped fellow soldiers during Oct. 7, said that she wanted to bring accountability to Hamas’s financial backers.
“I hope this lawsuit exposes the ‘terrorists in suits,’” Feifer-Weiser said. “The ones who smiled for the cameras, shook hands and spoke about tourism and economic growth in Gaza, all while quietly helping Hamas dig terror tunnels beneath the surface.” JNS
{Matzav.com}