HaMoked — Center for the Defence of the Individual
A Jerusalem legal-aid organisation that takes individual Palestinian cases against the Israeli authorities — residency revocation, family unification, tracing detainees, house demolition, freedom of movement — and publishes the ministry data it extracts along the way.
HaMoked — the centre, in Hebrew — is an Israeli human rights organisation founded by Dr Lotte Salzberger and based in Jerusalem. It works case by case: an individual Palestinian brings a problem with the Israeli authorities, and HaMoked’s lawyers take it, up to Israel’s High Court of Justice where necessary. Its published topic list is a map of the ways a person can be administratively removed from their own life — revocation of residency in Jerusalem, family unification, child registration, tracing detainees, denial of prison visits, house demolitions, travel abroad, entry to Gaza.
For a reader in the diaspora, two files matter most.
Residency revocation. Every January HaMoked files a Freedom of Information request with Israel’s Ministry of Interior for the previous year’s figures on revocation of the permanent residency of East Jerusalem Palestinians — the policy it calls quiet deportation, in force since late 1995. The ministry’s answer of 1 September 2025 gave 60 revocations for 2024 and a cumulative 14,929 between 1967 and 2024. Those annual releases are the authoritative running count, and they also record what the ministry says its current policy is — including that residents living abroad will not lose status provided they visit periodically. See this archive’s entry on centre of life.
Entry and residence of foreigners. HaMoked petitioned Israel’s High Court in June 2022 against COGAT’s new procedure governing the entry of foreign nationals into the West Bank, and pressed the Defence Minister over the revised September 2022 version. Some of the most intrusive provisions — including a requirement that some applicants disclose land or property they owned or stood to inherit — were dropped before the procedure came into force.
Why it matters
- Individual representation, not only reporting: the organisation exists to take one person’s case.
- Its annual Freedom of Information releases are the primary published source for Israeli residency-revocation figures.
- It litigates the entry and family-unification rules that decide whether a Palestinian abroad can come home at all.
Key resources
Cited work
The summary above is written by FALASTEEN.AI. The document itself is published by HaMoked and is linked here in full.
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“HaMoked — Center for the Defence of the Individual.” Research Library, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/research/hamoked.- MLA
“HaMoked — Center for the Defence of the Individual.” Research Library, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/research/hamoked. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-hamoked, title = {HaMoked — Center for the Defence of the Individual}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/research/hamoked}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }