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