Military Order 291 (1968)
The order by which the Israeli military commander in the West Bank halted settlement of land title in December 1968, stopping the registration process mid-stream and leaving roughly two thirds of the territory permanently unregistered — the precondition for declaring that land 'state land'.
BADIL gives its title as the Order Concerning Land and Water Settlement (Judea and Samaria) No. 291. What it did was simple: it forbade any further settlement of title and stopped the applications already in progress. Work that had run since the British Mandate, and continued under Jordanian administration, ended where it stood.
BADIL dates the order to December 1968 and records that settlement of title had by then reached only 37.5 per cent of West Bank land. Everyone whose village the surveyors had not yet reached was left holding land they could not register. The Palestinian National Office for the Defence of the Land, in a report carried by WAFA, describes the order as the instrument that froze registration “and opened the door to disputes over remaining unregistered lands — which constitute about 66% of the West Bank”; Bimkom, the Israeli planning-rights organisation, puts the unregistered share at about 70 per cent.
One narrow exception survived, first registration, and it is privately funded, plot-by-plot and largely out of reach.
The order stood for fifty-seven years. On 11 May 2025 the Israeli Security Cabinet took Decision B/187, “Land Settlement in the Judea and Samaria Area”, instructing the military commander to resume settlement of title and to repeal Order 291 outright; a further government resolution of 15 February 2026 launched the process in Area C, with a stated objective of settling 15 per cent of unregistered West Bank land within four years. Adalah wrote to the Israeli authorities on 28 May 2025 demanding the decision’s cancellation, arguing that settlement of title is a sovereign act an occupying power may not perform, and that the process is structurally closed to Palestinian refugees displaced in 1967, to Palestinians in Gaza holding West Bank land, and to non-residents with pre-1967 land rights. Israel’s Supreme Court rejected a petition against the resumption in January 2026 as premature.
The two moves are not opposites. Freezing the register kept Palestinian ownership unprovable; unfreezing it, under Israeli authority and with an evidentiary bar set at Ottoman, Mandate and Jordanian paperwork, converts the same unprovability into registered title for the state. Bimkom’s research found that of East Jerusalem land registered between 2018 and 2024, when a parallel process ran there, 1 per cent was registered to Palestinians.
Sources
- Israeli Land Grab and Forced Population Transfer of Palestinians: A Handbook (PDF) — BADIL Resource Center, June 2013
- Israeli Security Cabinet Decision to Resume Land Registration in the West Bank is Illegal — Adalah, 2 June 2025
- Israel approves land settlement plan in the West Bank, accelerating annexation efforts — WAFA, 17 May 2025
- Israel’s move to register land ‘systematises dispossession’ of Palestinians — Al Jazeera, 16 February 2026
Cited works
4- badil.org — handbook2013engPDF(opens in a new tab)https://www.badil.org/phocadownload/Badil_docs/publications/handbook2013eng.pdf
- adalah.org(opens in a new tab)https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/11316
- english.wafa.ps(opens in a new tab)https://english.wafa.ps/Pages/Details/157427
- aljazeera.com — israels move to register land systematises dispossession of palestinians(opens in a new tab)https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/16/israels-move-to-register-land-systematises-dispossession-of-palestinians
Connected in the archive
3 connected records3 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
names this record — 2 records
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- First Registration
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Military Order 291 stopped settlement of title in the West Bank in December 1968.
- Tabu
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: That mundane gap became the whole game after 1967. Military Order 291 froze settlement of title in December 1968 and left the unregistered majority frozen with it.
named in this record — 1 record
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- Area A, Area B, and Area C
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: On 11 May 2025 the Israeli Security Cabinet took Decision B/187, "Land Settlement in the Judea and Samaria Area", instructing the military commander to resume settlement of title and to repeal Order 291 outright; a further government resolution of 15 February 2026 launched the process in Area C, with a stated objective of settling 15 per cent of unregistered West Bank land within four years.
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“Military Order 291 (1968).” Glossary, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/glossary/military-order-291.- MLA
“Military Order 291 (1968).” Glossary, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/glossary/military-order-291. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-military-order-291, title = {Military Order 291 (1968)}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/glossary/military-order-291}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }