Date: 17 / 03 / 2009  Time:  13:23
Bethlehem/Gaza – Ma’an –

A Palestinian family that lost 29 members to the Israeli offensive on Gaza in January has been exploited by a notorious lawyer falsely claiming to represent them in a 200 million dollar lawsuit against the Israeli government.

On 10 March, Muhammad Fuqara, a Palestinian lawyer living in Israel, announced that he was filing the suit for compensation on behalf of the Samouni clan in the District Court in Nazareth, a predominantly Arab city in northern Israel.

Ma’an’s investigation reveals that Fuqara acted without authorization by the family, had not filed a lawsuit. Further, other Israeli lawyers say that Fuqara has been exposed as a serial exploiter of migrant workers in Israel. Fuqara has been under investigation by the police and the Israeli bar association.

Two days after Fuqara’s announcement, members of the Samuni family told Israeli newspaper Haaretz that they had never given their power of attorney to Fuqara, and that they were attempting to withdraw the lawsuit.

The Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), which is now representing the family, later told Ma’an that their lawyers had checked with the Nazareth court and found that no such lawsuit had been filed.

Ibrahim Sourani, a lawyer for PCHR, said, “There never was a case. This was just for the media,” referring to Fuqara’s claim that he had filed the case.

“We were shocked” at the media reports of Fuqara’s lawsuit, said PCHR’s director, Jaber Wishah, adding that he worries the case could be damaging to the project of securing accountability for the dead in Gaza.

On 4 January 2009, Israeli soldiers corralled between 90 and 100 members of the Samouni family into one house in the Zaytoun neighborhood of Gaza City, and then shelled the house the next day. Twenty-nine people, including young children, were killed in one of the worst single massacres of the Israeli offensive on Gaza.

PCHR is taking the position that the Israeli government should admit criminal responsibility in the case, and not merely compensate the survivors financially.

In a statement on the Samouni case, PCHR expressed “deep concern about cases being filed to seek financial compensation in the absence of simultaneous criminal investigations.”

“The worst outcome of such cases,” PCHR said, “is that this may lead to a financial settlement and agreement reached between the lawyer and the accused, without the accused having to accept criminal responsibility. In such a scenario, victims may forfeit their right to seek future prosecution of war criminals who have engaged in violations of international law or suspected war crimes.”

“The outcome,” the statement continues, “would be limited to financial compensation, and would not lead to prosecution of those responsible or the holding to account of Israeli officers who have carried out criminal acts. It also belittles the high human cost paid by Palestinian civilians, often with the lives of their children.”

A senior member (mukhtar) of the Samouni clan, Subhi Samouni, denied appointing Fuqara as their lawyer, and said that the family does not want to file a compensation lawsuit. He said that one member of the family had spoken to Fuqara, and had sent some pictures of the victims to him, but only “so he could see what the Israeli army had done to my family.”

Fuqara himself denies both PCHR’s and Subhi Samuni’s accounts. He said that a man named Salah Samouni had sent him photos and asked him to file the lawsuit. He claimed that he had paid fees to the court out of his own pocket. He said the lawsuit was in the names of 74 people: 29 killed and 45 injured. He claimed that he had been scrupulous, “How can I go to the court unless I have all the details?”

By Fuqara’s own admission, he had only been approached by the Samunis a week before he claimed to file the lawsuit. Ibrahim Sourani at PCHR said it would be impossible to prepare a case of this complexity in such a short time, and that their own efforts on behalf of the family, perhaps involving multiple suits, would take a team of expert lawyers a minimum of several months to prepare.

Also casting doubt on the credibility of Fuqara’s claims is that he is apparently notorious for preying on vulnerable people at the fringes of Israeli society, particularly migrant workers. Hana Zohar, the director of the Tel Aviv-based organization Kav La’Oved, (the Workers’ Hotline), said she was aware of more than 30 individual complaints by workers who said they had been deceived by Fuqara.

Anat Kidron, a lawyer at the Workers’ Hotline, explained that in dozens of cases Fuqara promised migrant workers that he could petition in court to allow them to stay in Israel beyond the five-year limit mandated in Israeli law. Operating from an office in the central bus station in Tel Aviv, Fuqara would tell workers from countries such as China, the Philippines, Thailand, and Turkey that he legally arrange for them to stay in Israel for more years.

Frequently, Kidron said, Fuqara would charge these clients 3,000 to 4,000 US dollars, and then obtain a temporary court order to stop deportation for a few days at most. From there, the deception continued. Kidron, who is now representing some of the workers, said that Fuqara would then present the temporary court order, written in Hebrew, to the workers, saying that this document guaranteed that they could stay in Israel in the long term. In other cases, Kidron said, Fuqara would tear off the first page of his own petition to the court and give this to the client.

In some cases Fuqara’s clients were then arrested for staying in the country illegally. Others merely “paid thousands for nothing,” said Zohar.

Zohar, the other advocate at the Workers’ Hotline, said the number of complaints about Fuqara, and the “specific evidence” supporting these complaints, showed an “intentional pattern” of exploitation.

Zohar and Kidron said that police had opened an investigation against Fuqara, which had been closed for unknown reasons. The Israeli Bar Association has also opened an investigation that is still pending.

Confronted with these accusations, Fuqara confirmed that he had twice been investigated by the police, but said the fact that the probes had been closed was evidence that he had done no wrong. Asked if he had ever cheated migrant workers, he said, “of course not.”