Green Line
الخط الأخضر
The Green Line is the armistice demarcation line fixed by the 1949 agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors, named for the green ink used to draw it on the map; it served as Israel's de facto boundary until June 1967 and remains the internationally recognized reference for the occupied Palestinian territory.
The line emerged from the armistice talks held at Rhodes in the first half of 1949, when Israel signed separate agreements with Egypt (February), Lebanon (March), Jordan (April), and Syria (July). The agreements were explicit that the demarcation lines were military, not political: the Jordanian-Israeli agreement states that the lines were drawn ‘without prejudice to future territorial settlements or boundary lines or to claims of either Party relating thereto.’
After the June 1967 war, Israel occupied the territories beyond the line — the West Bank including East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula (returned to Egypt by 1982). UN Security Council Resolution 242 and nearly all subsequent diplomacy took the Green Line as the baseline: the ‘pre-1967 lines’ of two-state negotiations are the 1949 armistice line.
The line has no status as a permanent international border, yet it carries decisive legal weight. The International Court of Justice’s 2004 advisory opinion on Israel’s separation barrier treated the Green Line as the boundary of the occupied Palestinian territory and found the wall’s route unlawful where it cut east of the line into the West Bank.
Sources
Cited works
2- avalon.law.yale.edu — arm03.asp(opens in a new tab)https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/arm03.asp
- icj-cij.org(opens in a new tab)https://www.icj-cij.org/case/131
Connected in the archive
10 connected records10 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
names this record — 9 records
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- Absentees' Property Law (1950)
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: After 1967, Israel applied its law to occupied East Jerusalem, and the Custodian began declaring properties there "absentee" when their owners lived in the West Bank — people who had never moved at all, ruled absent from their own property because the Green Line now ran between them and Jerusalem.
- Checkpoint
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Israeli checkpoints in the occupied West Bank range from large, permanent terminals on the Green Line — Qalandia, between Ramallah and Jerusalem, is the best known — to partially staffed checkpoints, unannounced "flying" checkpoints, roadblocks, earth mounds, trenches, and metal gates at village entrances.
- Dunum
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Israeli declarations of "state land" in the West Bank, settlement master plans, the area enclosed between the separation barrier and the Green Line, the firing zones of the Jordan Valley and the South Hebron Hills, and the demolition and confiscation figures published each month by UN humanitarian monitors are all reported in dunums.
- Hafrada
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Begun in 2002 and running for hundreds of kilometres, it follows the Green Line for only a fraction of its length; the rest loops eastward into the occupied West Bank to place settlements on the Israeli side, enclosing Palestinian villages and cutting farmers off from their own fields.
- Identity Cards and the Permit Regime
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: …East Jerusalem for work, medical treatment, family visits, or worship; traveling between the West Bank and Gaza; reaching farmland in the "seam zone" between the Green Line and the separation barrier; or, for Gazans, leaving Gaza at all.…
- Qalqilyaقلقيلية
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Beginning in 2002–2003, Israel's separation barrier was built not along the Green Line but around the town itself: concrete walls and fenced barriers closed in on Qalqilya from the north, west and south, leaving the city — some forty thousand people — a single narrow exit to the east, with a tunnel under the barrier road linking it to the neighboring village of Habla.
- and 3 more
named in this record — 1 record
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- UN Security Council Resolution 242
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: UN Security Council Resolution 242 and nearly all subsequent diplomacy took the Green Line as the baseline: the 'pre-1967 lines' of two-state negotiations are the 1949 armistice line.
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“Green Line.” Glossary, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/glossary/green-line.- MLA
“Green Line.” Glossary, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/glossary/green-line. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-green-line, title = {Green Line}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/glossary/green-line}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }