Identity Cards and the Permit Regime

Since 1967, Israel has controlled the Palestinian population registry — the database that assigns every Palestinian in the occupied territory an identity number and status. West Bank and Gaza Strip residents hold Palestinian identity cards (long distinguished by color — green for the West Bank, orange for Gaza), which even after the Palestinian Authority began printing them under Oslo remain valid only with Israeli approval; Israel alone may add or delete registry entries. Palestinians in annexed East Jerusalem hold a different status again: blue Israeli identity cards marking them as “permanent residents” — not citizens — a status that can be revoked, and has been for thousands over the years.

Layered on the ID system is the permit regime: a web of more than a hundred permit types that Palestinians must obtain from the Israeli military for ordinary acts — entering Israel or 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. Permits are typically short-term, revocable without explanation, and their denial requires no stated reason.

Jewish Israeli settlers living in the same West Bank territory face no comparable restrictions and move freely between settlements and Israel. Human Rights Watch’s 2021 report A Threshold Crossed cites this identity-and-permit system — sorting rights and movement by national identity — as one of the core mechanisms of the discriminatory regime it documents; Israel describes the permits as security screening necessitated by attacks during the Second Intifada, when the regime was greatly expanded.

Sources

• Restrictions on Movement — B’Tselem
• A Threshold Crossed — Human Rights Watch, April 2021