An influential Gaza businessman allowed Hamas to benefit from his real estate investments, alleges a 189-page lawsuit filed Monday by American family members of the victims of Hamas’s October 7 attack. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, accuses Palestinian-American billionaire Bashar Masri of providing Hamas’s tunnel network with power and access points in properties built with international development funds.

The suit concerned Masri’s involvement in various Palestinian developments, including the Gaza Industrial Estate (GIE), Blue Beach Hotel, and Al Mashtal Hotel, rebranded as the Ayan Hotel.

“Above ground, the GIE was a showcase for legitimate businesses like Coca-Cola and a variety of light manufacturing companies,” the lawsuit conceded. “But beneath the surface, Masri and the companies he controls worked with Hamas to construct and conceal an elaborate subterranean attack tunnel network which Hamas used to burrow under the border into Israel, to attack nearby Israeli communities, and to ambush Israeli military personnel.”

“Hamas also used the GIE to probe the border fence and test the IDF’s response times and countermeasures in the lead up to the October 7 Attack. (Hamas even installed an anti-tank battery in one of the GIE’s water towers facing the border),” it added.

As for the hotels, “Hamas operatives and leaders — including the architect of the October 7 Attack, Yahya Sinwar — regularly used the hotels to host public and private Hamas events,” argued the lawsuit.

“In the following years, Defendants worked closely with Hamas to renovate and refurbish the hotels, including electrical upgrades used to power Hamas’s tunnel network beneath them, and to restore and enhance the rocket launching sites positioned near the hotels, which Hamas deployed on October 7, 2023, and thereafter,” the lawsuit alleged. “Hamas’s terrorist tunnel network not only ran under Masri’s hotels, but the tunnels were accessible directly from guest rooms and other facilities inside the hotels.”

In addition, “The restored Blue Beach Hotel included a labyrinth of tunnels with multiple shafts accessible inside and on the grounds of the hotel,” the lawsuit added. “The Blue Beach tunnel complex linked the hotel to the Badr Base, a Hamas training facility a few hundred meters southwest of the hotel, where the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades (‘Qassam Brigades’) — Hamas’s terror apparatus — trained its equivalent of the Navy SEALs and could reach the Mediterranean without deploying above-ground.”

The lawsuit concluded by arguing that “Defendants’ own actions on behalf of Hamas — which included knowingly providing use of properties, currency, safehouses, and services — were themselves ‘acts of international terrorism.’” It requested “treble damages pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 2333(a).”

18 U.S.C. § 2333(a) states that, “Any national of the United States injured in his or her person, property, or business by reason of an act of international terrorism, or his or her estate, survivors, or heirs, may sue therefor in any appropriate district court of the United States and shall recover threefold the damages he or she sustains and the cost of the suit, including attorney’s fees.”

“I hope this lawsuit exposes the ‘terrorists in suits,’” said Naomi Feifer-Weiser, one of the plaintiffs. “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.”

For his part, Masri responded that 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.”

I am incompetent to judge the merits of this highly unusual situation. I cannot determine Masri’s complicity or lack thereof. I know of no other civil lawsuits that compare to this one in its attempt to recoup damages for acts of terrorism, especially when the target of that lawsuit played a supporting role at best. I am confounded by the fact that private parties seek to hold Masri liable for crimes for which federal authorities have never attempted to prosecute him.

But general observations that I can provide may be more relevant to the historical moment, where President Trump and the Israelis are contemplating ways to rebuild a Gaza free from Hamas. A major question in the historic renovation effort is who — that is, which private parties — will develop it. One likely answer is that developers who invested in Gaza before the war would likely want to invest in a post-war Gaza.

Masri is one such investor who “is expected to play a role in the reconstruction of Gaza,” according to The New York Times. Not only is Masri a native of Nablus (in Palestinian-occupied Samaria) who became a naturalized U.S. citizen, then sought to reinvest in the Palestinian territories, but he also is linked with Adam Boehler, a special envoy in the Trump administration for hostage negotiations. Masri stands out as one of the wealthiest, well-connected figures with a personal connection to the region.

But the lawsuit against Masri illustrates a complication. Since Hamas literally ran the government of Gaza, any pre-war real estate developer would have had to transact at least some business with Hamas. This means that there is at least a colorable case to be made that these developers were cooperating with terrorists. Does this mean that all of them are suspect? Can any of them be trusted? (The complainant families in this lawsuit would likely answer yes, and no.)

If untrustworthy developers with pro-Hamas sympathies are allowed to participate in the Gaza rebuilding effort, they might secretly provide for Hamas’s reintroduction to the Strip. If the standards for trustworthiness are raised too high, it might create a chokepoint that prevents investors from entering Gaza, which would tie Gaza’s shoelaces together before the region even got up and running.

There isn’t an easy solution to this conundrum, but it is yet another sticky point that the rebuilders of Gaza will have to resolve.