The West Bank

Al-Haq — Defending Human Rights in Palestine

Al-Haq

Al-Haq is a Palestinian non-governmental human rights organization based in Ramallah, specializing in legal research, advocacy, and international accountability.

BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights

BADIL

Founded in 1998 in Bethlehem, BADIL defends the rights of Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons, with a legal focus on residency, return, property restitution, and the right of return under international law.

B'Tselem — The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories

B'Tselem

B'Tselem documents human rights abuses in the Israeli-occupied territories through field research, video testimony, and policy analysis. Founded in 1989 by Israeli academics, attorneys, and journalists, it publishes reports in Hebrew, Arabic, and English.

Defense for Children International — Palestine (DCIP)

DCIP

DCIP documents the detention, killing, and maiming of Palestinian children by Israeli forces and advocates for their rights under international law.

Human Rights Watch — Israel and Palestine

Human Rights Watch

HRW investigates and reports on human rights conditions in Israel and Palestine, including laws and policies affecting Palestinians under occupation and in Israel.

UN OCHA OPT — United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

UN OCHA

OCHA coordinates humanitarian response in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and publishes data dashboards, situation reports, and access maps used by aid agencies and journalists.

UNRWA — UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees

UNRWA

Established by UN General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV) in December 1949, UNRWA provides education, health care, and relief to millions of registered Palestine refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza.

WHO occupied Palestinian territory — health system support and emergency response

World Health Organization — occupied Palestinian territory

The WHO office for the occupied Palestinian territory supports the Palestinian health system, coordinates the health response to emergencies in Gaza and the West Bank, and publishes situation reports and data on attacks on health care.

Fadwa Touqan

1917–2003

One of the most celebrated female poets of the Arab world, Touqan gave voice to love, loss, and the Palestinian struggle from her home in Nablus.

Ibrahim Tuqan

1905–1941

Poet of the 1936 revolt and author of 'Mawtini,' the verse that served as Palestine's unofficial anthem and became Iraq's national anthem in 2004.

Mourid Barghouti

1944–2021

Poet of exile and return, Barghouti turned the absurdities and griefs of displacement into luminous, ironic prose and verse.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Palestine and 'The Message'

Ta-Nehisi Coates

It occurred to me that there was still one place on the planet — under American patronage — that resembled the world that my parents were born into.

Abu Ali Mustafa

1938–2001

Mustafa al-Zabri, the peasant's son who spent five years in a desert prison and thirty-two in exile, returned in 1999 to lead the PFLP and was killed by an Israeli missile in his Ramallah office.

Annemarie Jacir

1974–

Palestinian filmmaker whose four features — from *Salt of This Sea* to *Palestine 36* — have all represented Palestine at the Academy Awards.

Emily Jacir

1970–

Artist who used her American passport to carry out the errands Palestinians were not permitted to make themselves, and who sewed the names of 418 destroyed villages into a refugee tent.

Issam Abdul Hadi

1928–2013

The Nablus women's organizer who led the General Union of Palestinian Women from its founding in 1965 until 2009, was tortured and deported by Israel in 1969, and became the first woman on the PLO's Central Council.

Juliano Mer-Khamis

1958–2011

Actor and director who founded the Freedom Theatre in Jenin refugee camp and was assassinated outside it in 2011.

Karimeh Abbud

1893–1940

The first woman photographer in Palestine, who stamped her prints 'Karimeh Abbud — Lady Photographer' and left a portrait record of Palestinian life two decades before the Nakba.

Khalida Jarrar

1963–

The Nablus-born parliamentarian and Addameer director, arrested five times and held for years in administrative detention and solitary confinement — denied even her daughter's funeral — who emerged from each imprisonment restating the same demand: freedom from colonial domination.

Mustafa Barghouti

1954–

The Moscow-trained physician who built the Palestinian Medical Relief Society into a health service reaching over a million patients a year, co-founded the Palestinian National Initiative with Edward Said and Haidar Abdel Shafi, and came second to Abbas in the 2005 presidential election.

Raja Shehadeh

1951–

Ramallah-based writer and lawyer, founder of Al-Haq, whose memoirs record the vanishing landscape of the West Bank.

Shireen Abu Akleh

1971–2022

Veteran Al Jazeera correspondent and household name across the Arab world, killed while covering an Israeli raid in Jenin in 2022.

Suad Amiry

1951–

Founder of Riwaq, the first organisation dedicated to conserving Palestinian architectural heritage, and author of a curfew diary that won Italy's Viareggio Prize.

Vera Tamari

1945–

Ceramicist and museum-builder who, after Israeli tanks crushed hundreds of cars in Ramallah in 2002, lined five of the wrecks up on a road she built and called it Going for a Ride?

Wael Zuaiter

1934–1972

The Nablus-born translator and PLO representative in Rome — a friend of Moravia, Genet and Pasolini, at work on the first Italian translation of the Thousand and One Nights — shot dead by Israeli agents outside his apartment on 16 October 1972.

Yasser Arafat

1929–2004

Founder of Fatah and chairman of the PLO for thirty-five years, who told the UN in 1974 that he came bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun.

I Saw Ramallah

Mourid Barghouti

A poet crosses the Allenby Bridge home after thirty years of exile — the most beloved Palestinian memoir of return.

Minor Detail

Adania Shibli

A rape and murder in the Negev in 1949, and a woman in present-day Ramallah who cannot let it go — a novel of devastating formal precision.

Mornings in Jenin

Susan Abulhawa

A multi-generational family saga from a village near Acre to the Jenin refugee camp — the novel that brought the Palestinian story to millions of readers worldwide.

Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape

Raja Shehadeh

Six walks across twenty-six years in the hills around Ramallah — an Orwell Prize-winning elegy for a landscape being lost to settlements and the wall.

Salt Houses

Hala Alyan

A sweeping debut novel following three generations of a Palestinian family from Nablus to Kuwait, Beirut, Paris, and Boston — winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

Ilan Pappé

Pappé's archival history of how Israel's generals and politicians built the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza — a 'mega-prison' by design.

The Buraq Uprising

1929

A year-long dispute over access to al-Buraq — the Western Wall — erupted in August 1929 into violence that spread from Jerusalem to Hebron and Safed. The Shaw Commission counted 133 Jews and 116 Arabs killed; many of the Arab casualties, it found, were caused by rifle fire from the police and military.

Ibrahimi Mosque Massacre

1994

Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein guns down twenty-nine Palestinian worshippers at Hebron's Ibrahimi Mosque during Ramadan; the restrictions imposed in response fall on Palestinians and hollow out Hebron's Old City.

The ICJ Advisory Opinion on the Occupation

2024

On 19 July 2024 the International Court of Justice found Israel's continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory unlawful and held that it must be brought to an end as rapidly as possible, settlements evacuated and reparation made. The General Assembly demanded compliance within twelve months.

The ICJ Advisory Opinion on the Wall

2004

On 9 July 2004 the International Court of Justice found that the wall Israel was building inside the occupied West Bank was contrary to international law, that Israel must stop building it, dismantle what stood and make reparation — and that other states must not recognise the situation it created.

The Battle of Jenin

2002

The fiercest battle of Operation Defensive Shield leaves the heart of Jenin refugee camp in ruins — and a bitter dispute over the death toll.

The Mandate for Palestine

1922

The League of Nations approved the Mandate on 24 July 1922. Its preamble wrote the Balfour Declaration into international law, and its articles obliged Britain to facilitate Jewish immigration and settlement — while referring to the Arab majority only as 'the existing non-Jewish communities.'

Oslo II and the Division of the West Bank

1995

The Interim Agreement signed on 28 September 1995 cut the occupied West Bank into Areas A, B and C for a five-year transition. Thirty years later the transition has not ended, and Area C — about sixty percent of the territory — remains under full Israeli control.

Palestine Joins UNESCO

2011

On 31 October 2011 UNESCO's General Conference admitted Palestine as a member state — the first UN agency to do so. The United States cut off its funding within days; Palestine went on to inscribe Bethlehem, Battir and Hebron on the World Heritage List.

Plan Dalet

1948

The Haganah's Plan D, finalised on 10 March 1948 and set in motion in early April, provided for securing the area of the Jewish state and the settlements beyond it — including, where villages resisted, their destruction and the expulsion of their inhabitants.

The Six-Day War

1967

Israel captures the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, Sinai, and the Golan Heights in six days, beginning a military occupation that continues to this day.

Bethlehem Mother-of-Pearl

Nacre carved into crosses, rosaries, and models of the Church of the Nativity — a Bethlehem trade at least four centuries old, and for much of it a women's trade.

Hebron Glass

The hand-blown glass of Hebron — blue, green, and amber vessels shaped for centuries in family factories beside the old city.

Knafeh Nabulsiyeh

Nablus's dessert of salty white cheese under orange pastry, drenched in syrup and cut from a tray the width of a table.

Nabulsi Soap

Ivory cubes of olive oil soap stacked in drying towers — an industry that made Nablus the soap capital of the Levant, and that has been dismantled by earthquake, border, and occupation.

Palestinian Pottery

Red clay thrown on a hand wheel in Gaza and Hebron — cooking pots, water jars, and plant vessels made by families whose surname is simply 'the potter'.

The Thobe

The Palestinian dress and its regional grammar — the chest panel, the coin headdress of Ramallah, the gold-couched malak of Bethlehem — and what happened to that geography after 1948.

Enough for Me

Fadwa Touqan

Touqan's brief late poem asks for one thing only — to die on her country's soil and remain there as dust, grass, and a flower. Its lines are carved on her gravestone in Nablus.

Here We Will Stay

Tawfiq Ziyad

The anthem of Palestinian steadfastness: Ziyad vows that those who remained in Lidda, Ramla, and the Galilee will stay 'like a wall upon your chest' — rooted, working, and unerasable.

Administrative Detention

legal

Imprisonment without charge or trial, ordered by military commanders on the basis of secret evidence and renewable in six-month increments without limit; Israel uses it extensively against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

Area A, Area B, and Area C

legal

The three zones into which the 1995 Oslo II Interim Agreement divided the occupied West Bank: Area A under Palestinian civil and security control, Area B under Palestinian civil and Israeli security control, and Area C — about 60 percent of the territory — under full Israeli control.

Checkpoint

geography

Fixed or mobile Israeli military barriers where soldiers inspect Palestinian identity cards and permits, controlling movement between West Bank cities, into Israel and East Jerusalem, and along the separation barrier.

Identity Cards and the Permit Regime

society

The system of Israeli-controlled Palestinian identity cards and movement permits that determines where Palestinians may live, work, and travel, distinguishing West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem residents from one another and from citizens of Israel.

Military Order 101

legal

An August 1967 Israeli military order that bans political gatherings, processions, and publications — including the display of flags and political symbols — in the occupied West Bank without prior permission from the military commander.

Naksa

history

The Naksa — Arabic for 'setback' — is the term used across the Arab world for the defeat of June 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank including East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, and Syria's Golan Heights, and several hundred thousand Palestinians were newly displaced.

Oslo Accords

history

The Oslo Accords are the interim agreements negotiated secretly in Norway and signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1993 and 1995, establishing mutual recognition, creating the Palestinian Authority, and setting a five-year framework for a final settlement that was never concluded.

Settlement

legal

Settlements are the residential communities Israel has built for its citizens in the territories occupied in 1967. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring parts of its own civilian population into occupied territory, and the UN Security Council has affirmed that the settlements have 'no legal validity.'

Al-Dawayima

Hebron

Al-Dawayima was one of the largest villages of the Hebron hills, with 3,710 people and more than 60,000 dunums of land in 1944/45. On 29 October 1948, during Operation Yoav, the 89th Battalion of Israel's Eighth Armoured Brigade entered the village and killed civilians in the houses, in the mosque and at the mouth of a cave. The moshav of Amatzya was built on its land in 1955.

Al-Lajjun

Jenin

Al-Lajjun stood beside Tell al-Mutasallim — ancient Megiddo — at the southwestern edge of Marj Ibn Amir, on the site of the Roman camp of the Sixth Legion. Repopulated in the late nineteenth century by families from Umm al-Fahm, it counted 1,103 people in 1944/45 and was taken by the Golani Brigade at dawn on 30 May 1948. Kibbutz Megiddo was built on its lands from 1949; most of its people returned to Umm al-Fahm.

Al-Walaja

Jerusalem

Al-Walaja, a terraced village of springs and olive groves west of Jerusalem, was emptied in October 1948 — but its people rebuilt on the fragment of their lands that fell on the West Bank side of the armistice line. Today the rebuilt village is hemmed in by settlements and nearly ringed by the separation barrier.

Ayn Ghazal

Haifa

Ayn Ghazal, on the wooded slopes of Mount Carmel south of Haifa, held out with Jaba and Ijzim in the 'little triangle' until late July 1948. Its people were expelled toward Jenin and Tulkarm, and its lands became moshav farmland and JNF forest.

Bayt Jibrin

Hebron

Bayt Jibrin, the Roman city of Eleutheropolis, dominated the crossroads of the southern hills until October 1948, when it was captured during Operation Yoav. Its people fled to the Hebron hills and refugee camps such as al-Fawwar and Aida; kibbutz Beit Guvrin rose on its lands.

Bayt Nabala

Ramla

Bayt Nabala looked out over the plain around Lydda from a rocky hill east of the airport, 2,310 people holding 15,051 dunums in 1944/45. On 13 July 1948 Israeli soldiers drove much of the expelled population of Lydda towards it while it was still in Arab hands; the village fell within days, during Operation Dani, and was demolished on 13 September 1948. Its people scattered to Ramallah, Deir Ammar, Rantis and the Jalazone camp.

Burayr

Gaza

Burayr, one of the largest grain-growing villages of the Gaza coast, twice drove off attackers in early 1948 before the Palmach's Negev Brigade seized it in a single night in May, days before the Mandate ended. Five Israeli settlements were planted on its lands; scattered cactuses and the trace of its streets mark the site.

Dayr Ayyub

Ramla

Dayr Ayyub, a hamlet on the slopes above the Ramla–Jerusalem highway that revered the tomb of the prophet Job, changed hands repeatedly in the Latrun battles of 1948 and ended the war depopulated near the armistice line. No settlement was built on its lands; the eastern edge of Canada Park lies over the site.

Kafr Lam

Haifa

Kafr Lam was a small grain-farming village on the coast south of Haifa, crowded inside the walls of an early Islamic ribat that the Crusaders called Cafarlet. Cleared of its people by July 1948, it escaped demolition thanks to its ruins; the fortress and several houses still stand within the moshav of HaBonim.

Kawkab al-Hawa

Beisan

Kawkab al-Hawa was built inside the walls of the Crusader fortress of Belvoir, three hundred metres above the Jordan valley eleven kilometres north of Baysan. Its 300 people held 9,949 dunums in 1944/45. It was attacked on 16 May 1948, changed hands during the Iraqi advance, and was finally held by the Golani Brigade. The Arab village was erased; the castle was excavated and turned into a tourist site.

Qastina

Gaza

Qastina stood on the highway between al-Majdal and the Jerusalem–Jaffa road, its 890 people farming grain and citrus beside the British camp at Beer Tuvia. The Giv'ati Brigade seized it days after the first truce ended, in July 1948; Kiryat Malakhi and several settlements later rose on its lands.

Sirin

Beisan

Sirin lay seventeen kilometres north of Baysan, a village of 810 Muslims and Christians holding 28,445 dunums in 1944/45, with Byzantine mosaics and a Greek inscription among its houses. Units of the Golani Brigade occupied it on 12 May 1948, the day Baysan fell. No Israeli settlement was built on its land; a cemetery and a single house survive.

Summil

Gaza

Summil, a grain and sheep village on a wadi-ringed sandy hill whose revenues the Mamluks once endowed to Hebron's Ibrahimi mosque, fell in the Giv'ati Brigade's push south during the 'Ten Days' of July 1948, its people most likely driven toward Hebron. A length of old wall and a cactus-lined road remain.

Zikrin

Hebron

Zikrin grew grain where the southern coastal plain meets the foothills of the Hebron mountains. The Giv'ati Brigade occupied it in late October 1948 during Operation Yoav; its site, known as Khirbet Dhikrin, is overgrown scrub marked by broken terraces, olive and carob trees, and the rubble of houses.

Zir'in

Jenin

Zir'in stood on a spur above Marj Ibn Amir, on the site of biblical Jezreel and beside the spring of Ayn Jalut where Baybars turned back the Mongols in 1260. Its 1,420 people held 23,920 dunums in 1944/45. The Fourth Battalion of the Golani Brigade took the village on 28 May 1948; the kibbutz of Yizre'el was founded on its northwestern side the same year.

Acre

Western Galilee coast

Acre — Akka — is the walled city that broke Napoleon: a Phoenician port, the Crusaders' last capital, and an Ottoman citadel-town whose Old City is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Most of its people were expelled in 1948; among its exiled children was Ghassan Kanafani.

Balata Camp

Nablus, West Bank

Laid out in 1950 on rented farmland east of Nablus for 4,484 refugees, Balata became the most crowded refugee camp in the West Bank — a quarter square kilometre holding the descendants of some 111 destroyed towns and villages, and the place where organised refugee-rights politics in the West Bank began.

Bethlehem

Bethlehem Governorate, West Bank

Bethlehem — Beit Lahm — carries a double weight: the birthplace of Jesus beneath the sixth-century Church of the Nativity, and a town pressed between settlements and the separation wall that now seals it off from Jerusalem, five miles away.

Dheisheh Camp

Bethlehem, West Bank

Established in 1949 on a third of a square kilometre south of Bethlehem, Dheisheh gathered the survivors of as many as 79 villages from six subdistricts — Hebron, Jerusalem, Ramla, Gaza, Bir al-Sabi' and Jaffa; Zakariyya, Bayt Nattif, Ras Abu Ammar, al-Walaja and al-Qabu among them — into one of the most politically formidable camps in Palestine.

Hebron

Hebron Governorate, southern West Bank

Hebron — al-Khalil, the city of Abraham — is one of the oldest living cities in the world, built around the Ibrahimi Mosque over the Cave of the Patriarchs, famed for its glass and its hospitality, and divided since 1997 into the sharpest microcosm of the occupation.

Jenin

Northern West Bank

Jenin guarded the pass to the Jezreel plain for millennia, defied the British in the 1936 revolt, and held off Israel in June 1948; its refugee camp, born of the Nakba, fought the army for ten days in April 2002. The raids still come. The memory holds.

Jericho

Jordan Valley, West Bank

Jericho — Ariha, the city of palms, some 250 metres below the sea — has lived beside its spring for roughly ten thousand years, longer perhaps than any city on earth. In living memory its valley twice filled with refugees; the camps of 1948, Aqabat Jabr and Ein as-Sultan, are still there.

Jerusalem

Jerusalem Governorate

Jerusalem — al-Quds — is the city Palestinians measure all distance from: holy to three faiths, capital in memory and aspiration, and since 1967 the hardest fault line of the conflict, from the walls of the Old City to the threatened homes of Sheikh Jarrah.

Masafer Yatta

South Hebron Hills, West Bank

A cluster of hamlets of cave-dwellers and shepherds in the South Hebron Hills, declared a live-fire training area — Firing Zone 918 — in the 1980s. In May 2022 Israel's High Court ruled there was no legal barrier to expelling the roughly 1,150 people who live there.

Nablus

Nablus Governorate, northern West Bank

Nablus — Roman Flavia Neapolis, nestled between Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal — is the northern West Bank's proud commercial heart, famed for its Old City, its olive-oil soap and its knafeh, and shadowed by Balata, the West Bank's most populous refugee camp.

Qalqilya

West Bank

Qalqilya, the orange-growing market town at the western edge of the West Bank, was gutted in 1967 and rebuilt by its returning people; since 2003 the separation wall has closed around it on three sides, leaving a whole city a single gate.

Ramallah

Ramallah and al-Bireh Governorate, central West Bank

Ramallah, twin city of al-Bireh in the hills north of Jerusalem, grew from a sixteenth-century Christian village into the de facto administrative capital of Palestine — seat of the Authority, home of its cultural life, and the burial place of Mahmoud Darwish.

Tulkarm

West Bank

Tulkarm — the 'Mount of the Vineyard' — was the market town where the Samarian hills meet the coastal plain, until the 1949 armistice line took most of its fields; its refugee camp is among the largest in the West Bank, and its streets have known every army of the last century.

The Jews made the desert bloom — Palestine was barren until Zionist settlement

demography

Palestine was a cultivated, exporting country long before Zionist settlement: the Mandate's own 1945 statistics show Arabs holding 84.7% of the cultivable land to the Jews' 12.8%, and Zionism's own Ahad Ha'am reported in 1891 that it was 'hard to find tillable land that is not already tilled.'

Ahmad Abughoush

Expelled from Imwas at fourteen during the 1967 war, he describes his family's flight on foot to Ramallah before Israeli bulldozers razed the village and Canada Park was planted over its ruins.

Ismail Shammout

Expelled from Lydda at eighteen during the July 1948 "death march," he recalls an Israeli soldier stopping him at gunpoint from filling a pot with water as thousands trudged toward Ramallah in the heat.

Leila Giries

Eight years old when her family fled Ayn Karim on the western edge of Jerusalem in 1948; the family moved to the United States in 1958, and she now lives in a suburb of Los Angeles with the key to the house framed on her wall.

Darzah

embroidery

A nonprofit social-enterprise brand: tatreez and tahriri embroidered fashion and accessories, 100% handmade by women artisans in the West Bank.

Hirbawi

craft

Keffiyehs still woven on the original looms of the Hirbawi factory in Hebron — the last keffiyeh factory in Palestine. This is its official North America store.

The Nablus Soap Company

craft

Handmade traditional Nabulsi olive-oil soap — the classic paper-wrapped bar and its honey, rose, and pomegranate variants.

Nöl Collective

fashion

A Ramallah fashion collective co-creating garments with family-run sewing workshops, artisan studios, and women's cooperatives across Palestine.

Palestinian Soap Cooperative

craft

A cooperative importing traditional olive-oil soap from Nablus's remaining family soap factories — Shaka'a, Canaan, Tbeleh, Tuqan — with profit-sharing across the industry.

Women in Hebron

embroidery

A women's cooperative producing traditional Palestinian embroidery and handicrafts to economically empower women and their families in the Hebron area.

Aysenur Ezgi Eygi

1998–2024

Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, a recent University of Washington graduate volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement, was shot in the head by Israeli soldiers during a protest against settlement expansion in Beita, in what a witness told AP was a moment of calm.

Shireen Abu Akleh

1971–2022

Shireen Abu Akleh, 51, was shot in the head while covering an Israeli raid in Jenin, wearing a helmet and a vest marked 'PRESS'; investigations by CNN, the AP, The Washington Post and a UN commission concluded Israeli forces fired the fatal shot — CNN found evidence of a targeted attack — while Israel acknowledged a 'high possibility' its fire killed her but said it was accidental.

Tawfic Abdel Jabbar

c. 2006–2024

Tawfic Abdel Jabbar, 17, a Louisiana native spending a year in his family's ancestral West Bank village, was shot in the head by Israeli fire while driving a pickup truck on a dirt road hundreds of meters from the highway; the sole witness called the shooting unprovoked, and the White House demanded a transparent investigation.

The Abdul Hadi family

Nablus / Jenin (Arraba)

The feudal lords of Arraba who governed Nablus under Egyptian rule, were broken by the Ottomans in 1859, and re-emerged in the twentieth century as lawyers, party founders and — on both sides — combatants of the 1936–39 revolt.

The Barghouti family

Deir Ghassana, Ramallah

The great clan of the Bani Zeid highlands northwest of Ramallah, centered on the village of Deir Ghassana — sheikhs of the region in Ottoman times, and in the twentieth century a family of lawyers, communists and, above all, poets: Omar al-Saleh al-Barghouti, Bashir Barghouti and Mourid Barghouti.

The Khatib family

Jerusalem / Hebron

A 'prominent land-owning Hebron and East Jerusalemite family' that gave East Jerusalem two Jordanian-era mayors: Anwar al-Khatib, who governed the Old City for seventeen years, and Ruhi al-Khatib, who never accepted his dismissal by Israel and carried the title of mayor in exile until his death.

The Masri family

Nablus

A prominent merchant family of Nablus whose modern members — industrialists, bankers and a Jordanian prime minister — became some of Palestine's wealthiest businessmen; the surname itself, though, is shared by many unrelated families.

The Touqan family

Nablus

Nablus's old ruling house turned literary dynasty — governors of the city in Ottoman times, and in the twentieth century the family of the poets Ibrahim and Fadwa Touqan and the educator Qadri Touqan.