Insurance clause disappears: 8 luxury cars torched, and the battle for compensation begins

About six months ago, at the end of March, security cameras captured an unusual incident near the luxury car dealership Auto Premium on Lishansky Street in Rishon LeZion. At four in the morning, a heavy Benelli motorcycle arrived at the lot where cars worth millions of shekels were parked. A rider wearing a helmet got off, carrying two bottles containing liquid. After the rider poured the liquid onto two BMW vehicles and failed in an attempt to ignite the material, he drove to the gas station across the road, calmly refueled the motorcycle, filled another bottle with gasoline, and returned to the lot to finish what he started. This time, the arson succeeded.

The result: eight vehicles went up in flames, of which four (two BMWs, a Mercedes, and a Land Rover) were completely burned, and four others (Porsche, Audi, Land Rover, and BMW) were partially scorched. The damage, according to an appraiser's report, including damage to the lot itself, is 4.8 million shekels. Weeks later, the police arrested a suspect for the arson: Yitzhak Revivo (38) from Kiryat Malachi. In May 2026, the prosecution filed an indictment against him.

According to the request for detention filed by the Central District Attorney's Office through attorney Eliran Ashkenazi, Revivo denies the accusations, and "the motive for the defendant's actions is unknown to the applicant." The evidence will yet decide whether the arsonist was truly caught, but the lot owners' battle against insurance bureaucracy has only just begun. Migdal, which insured the vehicle inventory against damage up to 13 million shekels for a monthly premium of 49,000 shekels, is refusing to compensate for the damages.

"The policy does not cover damage caused by malice and/or arson," Migdal claims in its refusal letter. However, under the Insurance Contract Law, an insurer is exempt from its duty if the insured caused the insurance event. Migdal does not claim any such attempt at insurance fraud. A check reveals that the police investigation file contains no evidence or hint of an attempt to commit fraud by ordering the arson.

So why does Migdal refuse to pay? The company claims it made a mistake in the policy wording. "Due to a human error in the 2025 policy, a paragraph explicitly excluding damage caused by malice and/or arson was omitted," Migdal wrote in June 2026. The company insists that covering such damage would have increased the policy's cost.

In its statement of claim, Auto Premium calls Migdal's arguments an "artificial, invalid, and bad-faith attempt to insert retroactively into the policy an exception that was not included at the time of the incident." Attorney Chen Gilead, representing Auto Premium, stated: "The time has come to denounce the method where claim rejection is used as a lever of pressure on insured parties to force them to settle for benefits significantly lower than their rights under the law."