An unnamed senior US government official has pressured the families of victims of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terror invasion to drop a lawsuit against a prominent Palestinian-American businessman who is accused of allowing the terror group to use his properties, according to a court filing last month.
The businessman, Bashar Masri, denies all allegations of wrongdoing.
An amended complaint did not indicate that any of the plaintiffs had dropped the case.
The claim was made in an amended complaint filed in the case last month. The amended complaint did not indicate that any of the plaintiffs had dropped the case.
The lawsuit, filed last year, argued that Hamas deceived Israel ahead of the invasion by feigning an interest in developing Gaza, and claimed that Mari and his companies knowingly and deliberately integrated his Gaza properties into Hamas’s terrorist infrastructure and that were crucial elements in Hamas’s attack plan on October 7,” and that Masri, his companies and his Gaza properties, were “an integral part of that grand deception.”
The plaintiffs were around 200 American victims of the October 7 attack and their family members, including the families of slain hostages Hersh Goldberg-Polin and Itay Chen, and Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the US, whose son was killed in Gaza in November 2023.
The plaintiffs also include Israeli tech mogul Eyal Waldman, a peace activist and former business partner of Masri whose youngest daughter was among those killed by militants at the Nova outdoor dance festival on October 7.
One of Waldman’s firms once employed more than 100 Palestinian engineers ?in Rawabi and in Gaza through ?an IT company backed by Masri, an arrangement both men held up as an example of how economic cooperation could foster peace.
The lawsuit did not say that Masri knew about the October 7 attack, but it did assert that he was aware that Hamas was using his properties for military purposes.
Bashar Masri is a Palestinian-American billionaire and U.S. citizen who serves as chairman of Massar International and the Palestine Development and Investment Company (PADICO), as well as PRICO and PIEDCO.
Masri made his fortune working in real estate deals in Morocco, Libya, Jordan and Egypt, and also worked as a management consultant in London, Saudi Arabia and Washington DC.
Encouraged by the 1994 Oslo Accords, and eager to come back, Masri said he became determined “to help build a nation and give opportunities to my people.” He built Rawabi, a new town adjoining nearby Ramallah. Today, the city is one of the largest job providers in the West Bank, employing approximately 10,000 people.
Building Rawabi meant co-operation with Masri’s erstwhile enemy — Israel,
Masri shook hands with numerous Israeli army generals, politicians and businessmen in order to facilitate the construction of the city, build access roads and deliver building supplies. While Israel was cooperating in developing the Palestinian infrastructure particularly following the signing of the Oslo Accords, Palestinians remained resentful and opposed any permanent peace deal with the Jewish State. He has faced criticism from some Palestinians who are determined to see a Middle East without Israel. criticise him for “normalising the occupation.” All Palestinian factions and nongovernmental institutions, as well as all the Palestinian people, made a political decision not to ” normalize the occupation” even as Israel promoted a neighbourly Palestinian entity.
Masri, at that time, said he was not ashamed about his co-operation with Israeli businesses. “I’ll say one thing: our relationship with Israeli companies is very good – we’re not hiding it, we’re not ashamed of saying this.”
Yet, in April 2025, nearly 200 relatives of people killed in the October 7 Gaza Palestinian terrorist attacks that murdered 1,200 Israelis filed a lawsuit against Masri in U.S. federal court under the Anti-Terrorism Act.
The plaintiffs allege that Masri knowingly collaborated with Hamas for years, despite the organization’s designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. government since 1997. These are allegations, and Masri has denied wrongdoing.
The lawsuit focused on the 480,000-square-meter Gaza Industrial Estate, located across from Kibbutz Nahal Oz, one of the communities hardest hit on October 7. The estate received funding from USAID, the UN, the EU, and other donors and, according to the plaintiffs, Masri coordinated the development of the industrial zone with Hamas, while Hamas constructed tunnels beneath it, used the facility to conduct surveillance of the border, and drew electricity from the site to power its tunnels. The complaint also alleges that a Hamas anti-tank position was installed on the estate’s water tower, within sight of the border barrier.
Masri and his company also oversaw two luxury hotels in Gaza that Hamas, including the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, used for events. According to the lawsuit, Hamas tunnels ran beneath and connected to the hotels. One of them, the Blue Beach, was allegedly connected by tunnel to a Hamas training facility.
Since 2014, the Al-Mashtal Hotel, which displayed UN and EU logos on its roof, allegedly housed part of Hamas’s tunnel network used for launching rockets and served as a command post during that summer’s conflict.
The lawsuit further alleges that Hamas’s tunnel network was not merely located beneath Masri’s hotels but could be accessed directly from guest rooms and other areas inside the properties.
The rebuilt Blue Beach hotel allegedly contained a labyrinth of tunnels and multiple shafts connecting it to the Badr base, a training facility operated by the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades.
Masri was also one of roughly 70 major donors and senior executives who directly advised Harvard Kennedy School Dean, Jeremy Weinstein. Masri funded the Rawabi Fellowship for Palestinian students at Harvard Kennedy School, covering tuition, health insurance, and stipends.
When Weinstein visited Israel, he went to Rawabi and met with a handful of Palestinian HKS alumni at offices in Rawabi.
Marwan Durzi, a representative for Harvard Alumni in Palestine who attended the meeting, said it was a “very nice and frank” conversation with the dean. However, while Weinstein also visited Israel, he did not meet with members of the Harvard Club of Israel.
Just days after the lawsuit was filed, Masri resigned from the Harvard Kennedy School Dean’s Council. Harvard confirmed his resignation, while noting that the allegations should be addressed through the legal process.
Harvard has also faced extensive criticism over antisemitism on campus following October 7, with multiple independent assessments ranking it among the worst-performing universities regarding this issue.
After the lawsuit was filed, plaintiffs repeatedly attempted to serve Masri at his Washington, D.C., residence. Court records indicate that they believed he was in the Palestinian territories and sought permission to serve him by alternative means. A federal judge later granted the plaintiffs’ motions to allow alternative service and service abroad.
Shortly before October 7, Masri appointed Khaled Anabtawi, whom the lawsuit describes as closely connected to Hamas, as chairman of one of his Palestinian real-estate companies. The plaintiffs cite this episode as evidence of Masri’s alleged awareness of Hamas’s activities.
Bashar Masri was born in 1961 in Nablus, into one of the city’s prominent Arab families. Masri is Arabic for Egyptian and point to his family’s origins as belonging to a tribe or clan that migrated into the area from Egypt and settling in the ancient Jewish biblical town of Shechem, also known as Nablus.
By his own account, as a child he believed in using violence against the “occupation,” referring to Israel. In 1975, at the age of 14, he was imprisoned by Israel for throwing stones at soldiers and was arrested again in 1977, at age 16.
After studying and building a career in Washington, Masri returned to the region during the Oslo years. He went back to the Palestinian territories at the beginning of the First Intifada in 1987, saying that he wanted to participate in organizing it.
In a 2015 interview with TIME, Masri said: “At that stage, I wasn’t out demonstrating. I was more on the planning side.”
In 1991, Israel’s interior minister deemed him a security threat because of his support for violent activity and barred him from entering the country. He was permitted to return only in 1994, following the Oslo Accords.
The al-Masri clan is one of the most influential families in Nablus.
His father, Dr. Fayez Masri, was a prominent physician, president of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, and director of the National Hospital in Nablus. He was among the first Palestinian doctors to receive his education in the United States.
His grandfather, Hikmat al-Masri, served as speaker of the Jordanian House of Representatives and as a member of the Jordanian Senate. He also founded An-Najah University, which is now headed by Bashar’s uncle, Sabih al-Masri.
Munib al-Masri, Bashar’s uncle, is a billionaire industrialist often described as the “Palestinian Rockefeller” and a major figure in Palestinian business and politics.
Sabih al-Masri, a grand-uncle, is chairman of Arab Bank and one of the region’s most influential businessmen.
In 1994, Masri founded Massar International to develop the private sector of the Palestinian economy. In 1995, he became a co-founder of the Palestinian newspaper Al-Ayyam.
Today, Massar’s portfolio includes more than 30 companies spanning real estate, financial services, journalism, advertising, and information technology.
Masri is chairman of PADICO, one of the largest Palestinian investment companies, and vice chairman of Palestine Telecommunications Company (Jawwal). He also founded the first Palestinian private-equity fund, Siraj Fund, with approximately $90 million in assets.
In 2016, he was listed among the ten wealthiest people in Palestine.
The World Economic Forum named him a “Global Leader for Tomorrow.”
In 2018, Forbes included him on its list of the 50 greatest leaders in the world.
In December 2019, CBS 60 Minutes devoted a full-length segment to his Rawabi project, titled “Rawabi: One Man’s Vision for a Palestinian Future.”
He has also served on the board of trustees of An-Najah University and on the board of the Palestinian Olympic Committee.
The lawsuit alleges that after obtaining U.S. citizenship, Masri deliberately “reinvented himself,” building an image as a legitimate businessman and visionary while secretly maintaining relationships with Hamas.
The lawsuit seeks damages under the Anti-Terrorism Act and a trial by jury. It was filed in the federal district court of Washington, DC, where Masri has a residence. The law firms Willkie Farr & Gallagher, Osen, Stein Mitchell Beato & Missner, and Motley Rice are representing the plaintiffs.
“Our lawsuit not only seeks a measure of justice for the American victims of the October 7th attacks, but crucially, it strives to expose and hold accountable the various individuals and companies that aided and abetted Hamas’s brutal atrocities on that dark day — chief among them Bashar Masri and, regrettably, extending to international and US taxpayer-funded institutions,” Gary M. Osen, managing partner at Osen LLC, told The Times of Israel in a statement.
According to the complaint, he used his connections in Washington — including the Harvard Kennedy School Dean’s Council, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation’s advisory board from 2020 to 2023, and the Middle East Investment Initiative — to obtain financing from USAID, IFC, MIGA, and the World Bank while simultaneously receiving financing from Qatar.
On April 7, 2024, Masri posted a tribute on Facebook to a PFLP terrorist who had died of cancer in an Israeli prison while serving a life sentence for the 1984 murder of an Israeli soldier.
After IDF strikes on the Gaza Industrial Estate in May 2021, he publicly blamed Israel for the destruction while, according to the lawsuit, ignoring the presence of Hamas tunnels beneath the site. Hence the lawsuit brought by families of those murdered by the Palestinian terrorists allegedly actively supported by Bashar Masri who has, so far, evaded the justice demanded by the plaintiffs against him.
The problem for these victims of Palestinian terror emanating from Gaza is that Masri has conveniently disappeared and it has not been possible to serve notice on him.
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