Whose name is on the paper

The word is Tabu — الطابو — from the Ottoman Turkish tapu, a title deed. It names both the register and the paper it issues, and Palestinians use it the way an English speaker says the deeds.

The register begins with the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, which required land to be entered in the name of an individual — displacingmusha’, the collective village tenure in which strips were held in common and redistributed among households. Under the British Mandate the work was formalised: Land Courts were established and a systematic operation called settlement of title went village by village, investigating each parcel and recording an owner. Jordanian administration carried the same operation on in the West Bank from 1949 to 1967.

It was never finished, and the reasons are ordinary. Unregistered land was not taxed, and under Ottoman and Jordanian practice a family did not need a tabu entry in order to farm, sell or inherit land it had held for generations. BADIL, whose 2013 handbook is written for people facing confiscation rather than for lawyers, records that settlement of title had reached only 37.5 per cent of West Bank land by June 1967.

The published estimates of what remains unregistered do not agree, and it is worth saying so plainly: Adalah puts the pre-1967 registered share at approximately one third, concentrated around Jenin and in the Jordan Valley; the Palestinian National Office for the Defence of the Land, reported by WAFA, gives about 66 per cent unregistered; Bimkom’s head of research told Al Jazeera in February 2026 that about 70 per cent is “completely unregistered”, making it “very hard to determine who actually owns the land”. Adalah’s 2025 report on the settlement enterprise states that two thirds of the West Bank was not formally surveyed or registered before 1967. The range is 60-something to 70; the shape is the same in every source.

In December 1968 the Israeli military commander issuedMilitary Order 291, which BADIL titles the Order Concerning Land and Water Settlement. It forbade further settlement of title and stopped the applications then in progress. Everyone whose village the surveyors had not yet reached was left, permanently, holding land they could not register.

One narrow exception remained:first registration, based on Jordanian Law No. 6 of 1964 as amended by Israeli military orders. BADIL sets out what it costs. Unlike the state-funded operation it replaced, it is privately funded and covers one plot rather than a village; the applicant pays the Registration Committee’s costs including the fees of both their own lawyer and the Civil Administration’s, and is then charged levies of five per cent of the value of the land. The file must contain an up-to-date surveyor’s map and the property tax ledgers of the person the land came from, and notice must be published in two widely circulated Arabic newspapers and on a public sign in the village.

Meanwhile the same 1858 Ottoman Code was read the other way. Adalah’s 2025 report records that Israeli authorities rely on a draconian reading of the Code — under which land left uncultivated for three consecutive years reverts to the state — to declare unregistered West Bank land “state land”. On figures the Israeli Attorney General provided in December 2011, about 1,300,000dunums inArea C were classified as state land — around 42 per cent of Area C.

Then the freeze was lifted. On 11 May 2025 the Israeli Security Cabinet adopted Decision B/187, “Land Settlement in the Judea and Samaria Area”, instructing the military commander to resume settlement of title and repeal Order 291 outright. A 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. Israel’s Supreme Court rejected a petition against it in January 2026 as premature.

TheAbsentees’ Property Law of 1950and theCustodianit created are set out elsewhere in this archive. What matters here is the mechanism, and the Norwegian Refugee Council’s legal memo of February 2017 states it more plainly than most: the vesting is automatic. When the statutory conditions are met, ownership passes to the Custodian without any act, notice, registration or knowledge on anyone’s part. The Custodian does not have to register the property, and — NRC’s words — “does not even have to know about the absentee property to have rights to it.”

Which produces the sentence every diaspora reader should sit with. Because the law applies automatically, NRC writes, “people often only find out that they have lost ownership of their property when trying to deal with it” — when they try to sell it, transfer it, or build on it. In East Jerusalem an application to the Custodian is an integral part of transferring most property rights, of planning procedures and of applying for a building permit, which is why the discovery so often happens at the counter.

Recovery is possible in principle and rare in fact. Sections 28 and 29 allow the Custodian to release vested property to a previous owner or successor, but only on the recommendation of a special committee appointed by the government, and the committee works to no published criteria. NRC’s survey of the case law finds release more likely where the claimant is a resident of Israel, is not in a state defined as an enemy country, and has not acted against Israel — and that the interests of the state are weighed in every determination. The 1973 compensation law was open only to absentees resident in Israel and, because of its time limits, has been largely irrelevant since July 1988.

For Jerusalem the crucial turn came after 1967. Israel applied the law to the annexed area, then in 1970 legislated that residents of East Jerusalem were not absentees in respect of property inside it. That left uncovered the people who lived just outside the new municipal line but owned land inside it. Adalah, filing as amicus in 2013, argued that the Attorney General’s new position contradicted his predecessors’, who had held the law inapplicable to West Bank residents’ East Jerusalem property — Adalah put this as “all previous AGs” in 2013 and as predecessors who “largely opposed” the application in 2015, and the weaker formulation is the safe one. On 15 April 2015, in Civil Appeal 2250/06,Custodian of Absentees’ Property v. Daqaq, Israel’s Supreme Court held that the law does apply, validating past expropriations; the decision requires that future seizures be approved by ministerial committees in addition to the Attorney General. Adalah called it a green light. Both halves of that sentence are the finding.

If one thing on this page is worth reading twice, it is this, because it is the mechanism behind the family story that ends they went abroad to study, and they were not let back.

After 1967 Israel annexed East Jerusalem, applied its domestic law there, and gave the Palestinians living in it permanent residency under the Entry into Israel Law of 1952 — the status granted to a foreigner who comes to live in Israel. Human Rights Watch sets out the consequences: 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.

In 1995 the ministry reinterpreted that 1952 law to require residents to actively maintain a centre of life in Jerusalem. Under the new reading, HRW records, authorities began revoking residency from Jerusalemites who lived elsewhere in Palestine outside the municipal boundary, or who “studied or worked abroad for extended periods of time”. Jerusalemites who hold Israeli citizenship face no such test. HaMoked calls the policy quiet deportation.

The policy is not what it was, and saying so is part of stating it accurately. HaMoked reports that after litigation by it and others, permanent residents living in the Jerusalem “seam” neighbourhoods or who moved elsewhere in the West Bank will not lose their status, and neither will those living abroad — provided they visit periodically. In 2025 the ministry told HaMoked 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 after 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 pending; eight older requests were approved during the year, against 67 the year before.

HRW’s legal characterisation is that revocations which push 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.

Under military administration, registering a transfer at the tabu department meant an intolerable wait. Michael Fischbach, writing in Middle East Report in March 1997, describes what people did instead: sales “were generally conducted through a process known aswikala dawriyya(irrevocable power of attorney) by which the seller granted an intermediary the right to sell the land within a fixed, lengthy period of time.” The register stayed as it was. The authority to dispose of the land moved separately, on a sheet of paper, into someone else’s hands.

When the Palestinian Authority’s tabu department began taking registrations after 1995 and land prices rose, the consequences arrived at once. Fischbach records “thousands of residents” going to PA courts over occupation-era cases “from boundary disputes to allegations of fraudulent sales”, worsened by the practice “whereby some unscrupulous agents resold the same land more than once”. Two of the groups he names are this archive’s readers: “A number of Palestinians from Bethlehem currently living in Latin America discovered that their land in Palestine had been sold without their consent through such methods”, and Jordanians holding West Bank land rights “have similarly discovered that their rights have been disposed of improperly by other landowners in the village”.

The document is also what gets forged. In December 2008 the Associated Press reported the case of Abdel Latif Sumarin of Burqa, near Ramallah: a 2004 paper bearing his signature in English script and the stamp of a notary in a strip-mall postal shop in Tustin, California, transferred his family’s plot to a company. Public records show Sumarin died in 1961; his family says he could not write English; the notary said the signature was not his. The land became part of the Migron outpost, and his grandson, who can see its trailers from his living room, petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court to get it back. In December 2018 the Jordanian MP Khalil Attiyeh laid before the prime minister a power of attorney purporting to authorise the sale of a Palestinian home in East Jerusalem; the prime minister’s office stated the next day that the documents were forged, and the notary’s grandson said his grandfather had been dead for decades.

Two cautions belong here, and the page is weaker without them. First, none of this makes every power of attorney suspect, and none of it says who in any particular family did what; this archive names no one it cannot source. Second, the documented pattern is broader than any single culprit — Fischbach’s agents, the AP’s straw companies, and, on Alaa Mahajna’s account, a new exposure: among the February 2026 Israeli cabinet decisions was the publication of West Bank land registries previously protected under the applicable legal framework, exposing detailed information about Palestinian landowners and, he writes, “facilitating targeted blackmail, coercion, and, in many cases, illegal transactions”.

The honest answer is that it depends on which document you hold, which area the land is in, and which passport you carry — and that for most people the binding constraint is not property law at all. It is whether you can get in, and on what terms.

Start with the registry of people rather than of land. Shortly after 1967 Israel conducted a snap census of Palestinians physically present in the West Bank and Gaza — about 954,898 people — and built the Palestinian Population Registry from it. Only those present were given residency. At least 270,000 Palestinians who were travelling, working or studying abroad had their residency rights revoked immediately, and, the ICJP report records, the vast majority have never been permitted to return. Under Oslo the day-to-day administration of the registry passed to the Palestinian Authority; Israel retained the decision.

The only route to residency in the West Bank for a Palestinian holding foreign citizenship is family reunification, which requires a registered West Bank resident to apply and COGAT to approve. Israel effectively stopped processing those applications in 2000. There were two exceptions — roughly 35,000 applications processed between 2007 and 2009 as a “diplomatic gesture”, and several thousand more in 2021–22. Otherwise the freeze has held.

Short visits run through COGAT’s Procedure for Entry and Residence of Foreigners in the Judea and Samaria Area, in force since October 2022. Spouses and first-degree relatives of West Bank residents, children up to sixteen, businesspeople and investors, and journalists are listed as eligible for a permit of up to three months; anyone outside those categories needs advance approval on “exceptional circumstances or special humanitarian reasons”, terms the procedure does not define. Entry is in general via the Allenby Bridge Crossing. Extensions beyond 180 days require a COGAT official’s approval on “special considerations”, and among the factors weighed is “the risk of becoming entrenched in the Area”.

One point of accuracy, because it would be easy to get wrong in the other direction: the February 2022 draft of that procedure required some foreign nationals to disclose land or property they owned or stood to inherit in the West Bank on their visa application. Those provisions were removed from the version that came into force, after diplomatic pressure from the United States and objections from human rights groups who read them as intelligence-gathering aimed at the property of Palestinians with foreign citizenship. The requirement was proposed; it is not in the operative rules.

On buying and inheriting: the register that governs your parcel decides who administers the transaction — the Palestinian Land Authority in Areas A and B, the Israeli registry in East Jerusalem and inside the Green Line, with Area C now the subject of the Israeli process begun in 2026. Adalah’s objection to that process is, among other things, that it is closed to exactly the people this page is written for: refugees displaced in 1967 living in neighbouring countries, Palestinians in Gaza with West Bank land, and non-residents with pre-1967 rights. Beyond that, published sources do not support a general answer, and this page will not invent one.

General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) was adopted on 11 December 1948. Paragraph 11 reads, in full:

“Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible;

Instructs the Conciliation Commission to facilitate the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation…”

The phrase “right of return” does not appear, and BADIL explains why. The language came from the UN Mediator Count Folke Bernadotte, whose September 1948 report (A/648) recommended that “the right of Arab refugees to return to their homes in Jewish-controlled territory at the earliest possible date should be affirmed by the United Nations”. To broaden support before the vote, the Assembly cut all references to the partition plan and to the Mediator’s report, which deleted the first clause of paragraph 11 — the clause endorsing his conclusion on return. The sponsors of that amendment, BADIL records, were agreed that the change would not affect the substance.

The drafting history is worth carrying because it is so often used against the text. The First Committee rejected a US amendment that would have limited compensation to those choosing not to return, and rejected a Guatemalan amendment tying return to a proclamation of peace. It accepted a British suggestion changing “possible” date to “practicable”. The resolution as a whole passed 35 to 15 with 8 abstentions; the Arab states voted against it, over the question of Israeli UN membership, and — BADIL is explicit — “None of the votes cast against the resolution, however, related to paragraph 11.”

The UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine, established by the same resolution to facilitate implementation, set out in 1950 what paragraph 11 meant (working paper W/45): that “refugees” covers all persons displaced during the war in Palestine; that the refugees have a right of free choice about their future; and that they have a right to return to their homes and not merely to their homeland. Later papers concluded that refugees hold an individual right to both restitution and compensation, applying to those who return and to those who do not.

It has not been implemented. This archive’s entry on theright of returnsets out the wider legal basis and Israel’s stated objections. What the intervening years produced instead is a population: BADIL’s survey for 2019–2021 estimates that by the end of 2021, 9.17 million of the 14 million Palestinians worldwide — 65.5 per cent — were forcibly displaced, among them some 8.36 million refugees and 812,000 internally displaced people.

Which is the sentence to end the legal part on. The land question and the return question are one question. A register that cannot record you and a status that expires when you leave are two mechanisms with a single output, and the resolution that was supposed to answer it is seventy-seven years old and still unexecuted.