A right-wing nonprofit organization will apologize to Palestinian human rights Issa Amro after it had claimed on Facebook that he was living in the same house with a terrorist and was related to him.
Ad Kan will make the apology as part of a settlement reached between the two sides that was approved on Sunday by the Kfar Sava Magistrates Court. Amro sued Ad Kan for libel and sought 150,000 shekels ($41,250) in damages.
The suit was filed in March 2022 after the NGO uploaded an item on its Facebook page about a visit by students of the Negev Pre-Military Academy to the home of Amro, who is considered the best-known human rights activist in Hebron.
"It is strange that the students of a pre-military training academy visit the house of a terrorist," Ad Kan said in the post, adding later that "the family of the terrorist who brutally murdered the baby girl Shalhevet Pass (may God avenge her blood) who has for years been engaged in harming the Israel Defense Forces and the State of Israel in the international forums."
Under the settlement, Ad Kan will release a statement of apology in which it will say that the house Amro lives in is not and never has been the home of Pass' killer and that Amro is not related to him.
Specifically, Ad Kad will state: "We were wrong when we based our claim on another source, and today we are convinced that Mr. Amro is not a terrorist. To the extent that Mr. Amro was caused any emotional distress by the reports, we are sorry for that." In addition, the agreement stipulates that the organization will pay Amro's legal expenses, which remain confidential.
"Issa Amro is a defender of human rights who seeks to bring an end to the occupation without violence," Allon Sapir, the attorney who represented Amro together with Michael Sfard, told Haaretz. "The settler right, which has sought to silence his criticism of Israeli policies and settler violence, has gotten used to the idea that there is no price to be paid for publicly lying about Palestinian human rights defenders. Those days are over."
Haaretz had previously reported that allegedly incriminating documents against two left-wing activists issued by Ad Kan were determined to be fake or suspected to be fake by the police and the courts.
In one case, at least one of two documents made available to the media by the organization about the left-wing activist Ezra Nawi were found by a police investigator to be fake. Another document cited by the organization in a report against Neta Hazan, an activist in the Warriors for Peace organization, was found by a court hearing a defamation lawsuit may have been forged. Hazan won the suit against a right-wing activist named Itzik Magrafta.
Hazan is pursuing a libel suit against Ad Kan after the NGO claimed publicly that she had prohibited ties with Palestinian intelligence agencies. Attached to that allegation was the same document that had previously been determined to be unreliable.
Recently, Judge Ronan Peleg of the Kfar Sava Magistrate's Court proposed that the organization give Hazan a letter with its official logo on it, in which it states that the Israel Police had ended its investigation against her due to lack of evidence and that Ad Kan did not intend to harm her good name.
The two sides are expected to inform the court in the coming days if they agree to this compromise.
