Legal trickery: Israel has changed how land ‘ownership’ works in the West Bank.

Here’s what that means.

The Israeli government has effectively legalized the annexation of over 60% of the West Bank, but no one’s talking about it. Here’s what this means for Palestinians.

By Qassam Muaddi  June 12, 2025

Until last month, Palestinians in the West Bank preserved their land ownership certificates in case their land was claimed by the Israeli state or by Israeli settlers. But a recent Israeli government decision made their lands in the West Bank open to property registration by anybody, including settlers — forcing Palestinians to seek their land ownership recognition by the Israeli state or see the ownership of their lands transferred to Israeli hands.

Earlier this month, the Israeli government approved a decision to resume the land registry process for lands in Area C of the West Bank after decades of freezing. The decision entails grave consequences for Palestinian ownership of land in what constitutes 60% of the West Bank, as it puts an end to the treatment of Palestinian lands in Area C as occupied territory — instead treating them as a part of Israel.

How land registration started………………………….

What the decision means legally

The Israeli government’s recent decision to resume the land ownership registration in Area C considers all PA land ownership titles as “null and void.” This means that Palestinian owners of lands in Area C have no legal proof of their ownership before Israeli government bodies, except their old Jordanian titles, which in many cases don’t include the subsequent generations of heirs. This means that the entire process is automatically set back several decades for Palestinians.

But this decision also has a deep political implication, because Palestinian lands are no longer treated by Israel as militarily-administered lands, as they have been since 1967. Instead, Israel is placing the registration of land ownership in the hands of civil governmental bodies, which is in and of itself a practical implementation of annexation. 

More importantly, this opens the door to legalizing Israeli settler control of these lands.

“Palestinians are now forced to prove their legitimate ownership of their lands in front of Israeli courts, which are themselves biased,” Abdallah Hammad, advocacy director at the Jerusalem Legal Aid Center (JLAC), told Mondoweiss.

“Most lands in the West Bank are private lands whose owners have Jordanian documents proving that they paid taxes for their land ownership, but they hadn’t yet finished the ownership registration process when the 1967 occupation happened,” Hammad explained. “With the occupation restricting access to lands in Area C and restricting the Palestinian agricultural economy, devaluing the economic value of these lands, they become eligible to be declared for ‘public use.’ Then there are lands that were already state lands under the Jordanian government, and are thus public lands. But they don’t belong to the Israeli state legally.”

Hammad said that the main difference that this new decision makes is that it opens the door to register both unused lands and Jordanian state lands as Israeli state lands. “Before the decision, the Israeli government would declare a land as being ‘for public use,’ and the Palestinian owner would oppose that declaration in Israeli courts,” Hammad explained. “But now, lands that have no recent private ownership titles or that fall in the category of ‘public land’ will be registered as Israeli state lands, and that will make them easier to use for settlement expansion and legalizing settler outposts.” 

“This is annexation happening before our eyes,” Hammad emphasized.

Decades of colonization

For Palestinians, the Israeli government’s decision means that the hopes of saving their lands have become more distant. 

“We have been holding to the hope of safeguarding our lands until some political solution takes place, but now it seems that the only scenario ahead is the complete loss of our land,” a Palestinian landowner in the town of Taybeh, east of Ramallah, told Mondoweiss, asking not to be named…………………………………………………..

August 3, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized