Centre of Life

After 1967 Israel annexed East Jerusalem, applied its domestic law there, and offered the Palestinians living in it permanent residency under the Entry into Israel Law of 1952 — the status a foreigner receives who comes to live in Israel. Human Rights Watch sets out what that means: a permanent resident may live, work and receive benefits, but the status derives from presence, does not pass automatically to children or to a non-resident spouse, and may be revoked at the Interior Ministry’s discretion if the holder settles outside Israel. Palestinians born in Jerusalem hold, in their own city, the legal position of a guest.

For decades the ministry revoked status when a Jerusalemite had lived abroad seven years without renewing an exit permit, or had taken residency or citizenship elsewhere. In 1995 it reinterpreted the same 1952 law to require a resident to actively maintain a centre of life in Jerusalem. Under the new reading, as HRW records, Israeli authorities began revoking residency from Palestinian Jerusalemites who “lived in other parts of Palestine outside Jerusalem’s municipal borders or studied or worked abroad for extended periods of time.” Jerusalemites who hold Israeli citizenship are subject to no such test.

HaMoked has requested the figures from the Interior Ministry under the Freedom of Information Law every year since. On the ministry’s own numbers, between 1967 and 2024 Israel revoked the status of 14,929 Palestinians from East Jerusalem on the ground that it had “expired of itself”. In 2024 the figure was 60 people — 33 of them women, three of them minors, and 52 of them outside Israel on the date of revocation. B’Tselem’s table of the same ministry data shows how uneven the practice has been: 1,067 revocations in 1997, 788 in 1998, 1,363 in 2006, and 4,577 in 2008 alone. The two organisations’ recent annual figures do not line up — B’Tselem’s table, last updated in April 2023, carries 81 against 2023 where HaMoked’s returns give 81 for 2022 and 61 for 2023 — so the year-by-year detail should be read from HaMoked’s annual releases rather than from any single table.

The policy is not what it was, and saying so is part of stating it precisely. HaMoked reports that following litigation by it and others, permanent residents who live in the Jerusalem “seam” neighbourhoods or who have moved to other parts of the West Bank will not lose their status, and neither will those living abroad — provided they visit periodically. The ministry told HaMoked in 2025 that it does not revoke the status of Jerusalemites who “maintain a connection” to the city. A separate ground exists and has been used since 2006, and more since an October 2015 government decree: revocation for breach of a “minimal obligation of loyalty to the state of Israel”, applied to people accused of attacking Israelis and to their relatives.

Reinstatement is possible and slow. Of the requests filed in 2024, HaMoked reports one refused on a criminal ground, two suspended for the two-year examination period, and the rest still pending at the time of the ministry’s answer; eight older requests were approved during the year, against 67 the year before.

Human Rights Watch’s legal characterisation is that revocations which force Palestinians out of the territory they live in amount to forcible transfer or deportation of a protected population — permitted under the Fourth Geneva Convention only temporarily and for imperative military reasons, a standard that failing a centre-of-life test does not meet.

Sources

• Revocation of permanent residency in 2024: 60 East Jerusalem Palestinians were stripped of their permanent residency status — HaMoked, 2 September 2025
• Israel: Jerusalem Palestinians Stripped of Status — Human Rights Watch, 8 August 2017
• Statistics on Revocation of Residency in East Jerusalem — B’Tselem, updated 19 April 2023