Special to WorldTribune.com

The U.S. House of Representatives on Oct. 1 passed a bill that would block President Barack Obama from ending sanctions on Iran until American victims of Iranian-backed terrorism are compensated.

An aide to Rep. Patrick Meehan, Pennsylvania Republican, said that Israeli NGO Shurat Hadin was a key inspiration for Meehan’s presenting the bill, which passed with Republican support but not from Obama’s Democratic Party loyalists. Obama has promised to veto the legislation.

“It would be outrageous to release the $100 billion in frozen Iranian funds when these American families have unpaid court judgments against the terror sponsoring regime in Teheran,” said Shurat Hadin founder Nitsana Darshan-Leitner.

“If you release these funds you erase all hope for the families of ever getting a measure of justice against this outlaw regime,” she said.

The bill passed in Congress stated that U.S. victims of Iranian-backed terrorism are owed roughly $40 billion.

In August, a group of American victims of terrorism holding around $1.5 billion in U.S. court judgments against Teheran filed a motion to block the Obama administration from releasing an estimated $100 billion in frozen Iranian assets.

The Shurat Hadin motion said that under the recently concluded nuclear deal the U.S. has pledged to unfreeze Iranian funds belonging to the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) held primarily in overseas accounts, and to remove from sanctions lists (according to the NGO) the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)-connected Melli, Mellat and Sepah banks.

“The families claim that releasing the funds will preclude them from ever collecting on their judgments and deprive them of the only leverage they have to make Iran pay,” the Shurat Hadin motion said.

The judgments Shurat Hadin was referring to include deadly terror attacks on Americans committed from 1995 through 2006 by Iran terror proxies Hamas, Hizbullah and Islamic Jihad.

While the victims in Shurat Hadin’s motion were said to be owed around $1.5 billion, the $40 billion figure claimed by Congress covers all Iranian terror acts against all Americans, including against U.S. government property, dating back to 1979.

  House bill would block lifting of Iran sanctions until U.S. terror victims paid, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, Rep. Patrick Meehan, Shirat Hadin, WorldTribune.com