The Israeli government has approved a plan to begin land registration in the occupied West Bank, meaning it will be able to seize land from Palestinians who cannot prove ownership.<\/p>\n
For the first time since Israel\u2019s occupation of the West Bank in 1967, it will register such land as property of the state \u2013 also known as settlement of land title \u2013 in Area C of the occupied West Bank.<\/p>\n list of 3 items<\/span>end of list<\/span><\/section>\n Area C is the part of the West Bank that remains under direct Israeli control. It covers about 60 percent of the West Bank.<\/p>\n According to Israeli media, Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, who submitted the proposal to restart land registration with Minister of Justice Yariv Levin and Minister of Defence Israel Katz, said the move was a continuation of \u201cthe settlement revolution to control all our lands\u201d.<\/p>\n The Palestinian Authority presidency said the decision amounts to \u201cde facto annexation\u201d of the West Bank. It is the formalisation of the ongoing process of building settlements in the West Bank in violation of international law over the past several decades.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s what we know about how this could be implemented:<\/p>\n During Jordanian control of the West Bank from 1949 to 1967, the administration primarily followed the British Mandate of land ownership, under which land was registered as state or private property.<\/p>\n But only about one-third of the land in the West Bank was formally registered under this process. Large numbers of Palestinians living in the region had no documentation or other means of proving they owned their own land. Many of them had also lost documents or they had been destroyed during the 1967 six-day Arab-Israeli war, which resulted in the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.<\/p>\n When Israel took control of the West Bank, it discontinued the process of land registration.<\/p>\n Now, the government has decided to restart the land registration, a move that many Israeli human rights groups and political analysts have condemned.<\/p>\n Xavier Abu Eid, a political analyst based in the West Bank, described the Israeli government\u2019s move as a \u201cde facto annexation of Palestinian territory\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat they are doing is the implementation of annexation, packaging it as a mere bureaucratic process,\u201d he told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n He added that it reaffirms the idea that \u201cthere is a colonial power that sets two different sets of legislation depending on ethnic and religious identity, defined also as apartheid.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1993 and 1995, the Oslo Accords were signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. They laid out administrative control of the West Bank and Gaza and divided the occupied West Bank into three areas \u2013 Area A, Area B and Area C.<\/p>\n The new Palestinian Authority (PA) was granted full administrative control of 18 percent of the land \u2013 Area A \u2013 and joint control with Israel over 22 percent \u2013 Area B. Area C remained under complete Israeli military control. These areas were meant to be in place for five years, after which full administrative control would be handed to the PA. However, this transfer never took place.<\/p>\n The land registration that will now be restarted will apply to Area C, which is home to more than 300,000 Palestinian people.<\/p>\n According to the Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now, in Area C, about 58 percent of the land remains unregistered. In a statement on Sunday, the group warned that the Israeli government\u2019s land settlement process will now facilitate full Israeli control of this unregistered land.<\/p>\n Israeli authorities have provided few details about how the process will unfold, but essentially, it will likely involve transferring legal ownership of land to the Israeli state and issuing evictions to Palestinian communities, as has been happening in East Jerusalem in recent years, experts told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n Michal Braier, an architect and the head of research at Bimkom, an Israeli human rights organisation that focuses on land and housing rights, said it is likely Israeli authorities will take the same approach in the West Bank as they have taken in East Jerusalem since 2018. In East Jerusalem, only 1 percent of settled land has been registered to Palestinians from 2018 to 2024, according to Bimkom.<\/p>\n Braier said Israel will begin by selecting the areas of land it wants to register. The government has set a goal of registering about 15 percent of the unregistered land within the next four years, she added.<\/p>\n \u201cNow we can pretty clearly guess that this 15 percent will be lands where they assume that they can prove the state ownership easily or they can easily reject Palestinian ownership claims because a lot of these unregistered lands don\u2019t have clear records and the records go a very, very long time back. So it will be very hard to prove Palestinian ownership,\u201d she told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n In theory, she said, Palestinians will be able to file land claims as part of the new process, but in practice, it is likely that they will be prevented from successfully doing so.<\/p>\n \u201cEven if they do file claims, the legal bars they need to meet are very difficult to obtain. On top of this, there is the problem of Absentee Property Law, which moves land into the state\u2019s hands and is yet unclear how exactly it will be practised in the occupied West Bank. So Palestinians are highly likely to lose their individual property rights,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n The Absentee Property Law is an Israeli law enacted in 1950 that states that Israel has the right to seize property of \u201cabsentees\u201d \u2013 people who were expelled, fled or who left the country after November 29, 1947, the day the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution to end the British Mandate and recommend the creation of a Palestinian and a Jewish state. Israel was founded less than six months later.<\/p>\n Braier said land registration \u201cwill be used as another mechanism to grab land that they could not grab until now for different reasons and to build more settlements and push out Palestinians from Area C\u201d.<\/p>\nRecommended Stories <\/h2>\n
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