Jerusalem District Court is under exceptional strain, with 4,900 cases now pending before 37 judges, the current statutory bench. In practice, the court has fewer judges available: two seats remain vacant after no judicial appointments were made for a year and a half, three judges are nearing retirement and are no longer taking new cases, and three others are largely occupied by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s trial.
The Netanyahu panel, headed by Rivka Friedman-Feldman and including Moshe Bar-Am and Oded Shaham, has spent most of its time on that case. The intensive evidence stage began five years ago, and this week Netanyahu’s cross-examination ended. The judges are assigned only a very limited number of other matters, Friedman-Feldman in criminal cases and Bar-Am and Shaham in civil cases.
The court has also seen the sharpest rise in new civil filings of any district court in Israel. Civil cases filed there increased from 1,272 in 2023 to 1,584 in 2025, with the rise continuing in the first half of 2026. By comparison, Tel Aviv rose from 2,221 to 2,326, Beersheba from 396 to 459, and Haifa from 1,142 to 1,158.
The surge is tied to two laws enacted after the October 7 attacks, which allow terror victims to sue the Palestinian Authority for damages, including punitive compensation. Since the laws took effect in 2024, the court has opened 485 such cases on behalf of 9,300 plaintiffs, most connected to the October 7 attacks. The Palestinian Authority is the main defendant, and its tax funds are being seized by the state.
The flood of cases also comes with a heavy procedural burden, especially requests to freeze assets. Those applications are normally handled by a registrar, but Jerusalem District Court has had none since Penina Neuwirth was appointed a permanent judge last month. Judges are handling those duties themselves, while the appointment of a new registrar is stalled because Justice Minister Yariv Levin and Supreme Court President Yitzhak Amit have not cooperated. Earlier this month, the High Court ordered Levin to work with Amit, but no appointments have yet been made.
