One thread, every collection
The West Bank
Occupation, settlements, the wall, and the cities of the hills.
128 entries across 19 collections
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.
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.
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 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.
The Death of Yasser Arafat
2004
After two years confined by Israeli forces to his wrecked Ramallah compound, the PLO chairman dies in a French military hospital. The cause remains disputed; an era of Palestinian politics ends with him.
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 Rabat Summit
1974
Twenty Arab states unanimously recognize the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people — stripping Jordan's claim to the West Bank and clearing Arafat's road to the UN.
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.
The Split: Gaza and Ramallah
2007
Sixteen months after the election it lost, Fatah fights Hamas for control of Gaza and loses. Two administrations emerge on the same national territory, and every attempt to reunite them since has failed.
al-Bireh
Ramallah and al-Bireh Governorate, central West Bank
Ramallah's Muslim twin, at the top of the Jerusalem road — a Canaanite name meaning the wells, a Crusader church, 35,910 people in the 2007 census, and the Israeli Civil Administration's West Bank headquarters sitting on 1,422 dunums of its confiscated land.
ar-Ram
Jerusalem Governorate, West Bank
A town of 18,356 people on the Jerusalem–Ramallah road, cut from the city it was a suburb of by six kilometres of wall. ARIJ's field survey found that around 20,000 people had left ar-Ram since 2000 — more than the town's own recorded population.
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.
Beit Hanina
Jerusalem Governorate, occupied East Jerusalem
The next town north of Shu'fat on the Ramallah road, and the one the wall divided by name: Beit Hanina inside the Israeli-declared municipal boundary, Beit Hanina al-Balad — the old village it grew out of — left on the other side of the barrier, six kilometres and a checkpoint away from its own fields.
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.
Kufr 'Aqab
Jerusalem Governorate, occupied East Jerusalem
The last Jerusalem address before Ramallah, and the clearest thing the wall ever said. All of Kufr 'Aqab lies inside the municipal boundary Israel declared in 1967; the barrier leaves 92 per cent of it outside. Building inspectors have not entered since 2005, and by 2012 the neighbourhood accounted for 83 per cent of all new construction in the whole city of Jerusalem.
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.
Qalandiya
Jerusalem Governorate, West Bank
One name, four things: a village of about a thousand people, a refugee camp of 16,344 registered refugees, an airport that was Jerusalem's and is now a military camp, and the busiest checkpoint in the West Bank. Ninety-eight per cent of the village's land is Area C; the wall isolates 59 per cent of it.
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.
Sheikh Jarrah
Occupied East Jerusalem
Two kilometres north of the Old City, on the road that becomes the road to Ramallah: the quarter of Jerusalem's Muslim notables, and the place where refugee families rehoused by Jordan and UNRWA in 1956 have been evicted a second time — under an Israeli law that lets Jews reclaim pre-1948 property in East Jerusalem while denying Palestinians the equivalent right inside Israel.
Shu'fat
Jerusalem Governorate, occupied East Jerusalem
A village on the ridge north of Jerusalem, on the Ramallah road, swept inside the municipal boundary Israel declared in 1967 — and then cut in half by the wall. Shu'fat holds the only refugee camp inside that boundary: 16,419 registered refugees on 0.203 square kilometres, holding Jerusalem residency, paying Jerusalem taxes, and crossing a checkpoint to reach the city they legally live in.
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.
Abdullah Nashwan
al-Dawayima, Hebron district
Eleven years old when his family fled the massacre at al-Dawayima in October 1948; displaced again in 1967, he has lived in Jordan's Baqa'a camp since.
Ahmad Abughoush
Imwas, Latrun
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
Lydda
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.
Aysenur Ezgi Eygi
Turkish-American activist shot dead at a West Bank protest
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
Veteran Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent; Palestinian-American
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
Palestinian-American high-school senior from Louisiana
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.
Abu Ali Mustafa
Secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine · 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
Filmmaker and founder of Philistine Films · 1974–
Palestinian filmmaker whose four features — from *Salt of This Sea* to *Palestine 36* — have all represented Palestine at the Academy Awards.
Atta al-Zir
Rebel of the Buraq uprising, hanged at Acre · 1895–1930
The eldest of the three men hanged at Acre on 17 June 1930. A labourer and farmer from Hebron, he dictated his last letter to his mother in peasant dialect: dance, mother, do not grieve — and plant olives over the grave.
Emily Jacir
Artist · 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.
Farhan al-Saadi
Qassamite commander, hanged at Acre · c. 1858–1937
The old sheikh from a village west of Jenin who fired the opening shot of the 1936 revolt, and whom the British hanged at Acre in November 1937 while he was keeping the Ramadan fast. He was around eighty.
Issam Abdul Hadi
First president of the General Union of Palestinian Women · 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
Actor and founder of the Freedom Theatre in Jenin · 1958–2011
Actor and director who founded the Freedom Theatre in Jenin refugee camp and was assassinated outside it in 2011.
Karimeh Abbud
Photographer · 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
PFLP parliamentarian and prisoners' rights advocate, imprisoned five times by Israel · 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.
Marwan Barghouti
General secretary of Fatah in the West Bank, imprisoned in Israel since 2002 · 1959–
The Fatah leader from Kobar, imprisoned since 2002 under five life sentences after an Inter-Parliamentary Union-appointed observer concluded that breaches of international law made a fair trial impossible and that guilt had not been established — an observer's conclusion, not a court acquittal.
Muhammad Jamjoum
Rebel of the Buraq uprising, hanged at Acre · 1902–1930
Hanged with Fuad Hijazi and Atta al-Zir at Acre on 17 June 1930. His last letter asked that the nation not sell one span of its land — and that the words on his grave read: complete independence or a bitter death.
Mustafa Barghouti
Physician, founder of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society and general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative · 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
Writer and human rights lawyer · 1951–
Ramallah-based writer and lawyer, founder of Al-Haq, whose memoirs record the vanishing landscape of the West Bank.
Sadhij Nassar
Journalist and organiser of the Arab Women's Union · 1900–1970
Editor at Haifa's al-Karmil, founder of the Arab Women's Union, and the first Palestinian woman the British Mandate imprisoned for her politics — eleven months in the Bethlehem detention camp, on a file that described her as a very dangerous woman.
Shireen Abu Akleh
Journalist, Al Jazeera correspondent · 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
Architect and writer · 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
Ceramicist, installation artist, and art historian · 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
Writer, translator and PLO representative in Rome, first man killed in the Wrath of God assassinations · 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
Founder of Fatah, chairman of the PLO, president of the State of Palestine · 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.
Yusuf Abu Durra
Commander of the 1936–39 revolt · 1900–1939
A railway worker from a village near Jenin who escaped the cordon at Ya'bad where Qassam was killed, became one of the five commanders of the Great Revolt, stormed Atlit prison to free its inmates — and was handed to the British by the Arab Legion and hanged.
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.
A Mountainous Journey: A Poet's Autobiography
Fadwa Tuqan · 1990
The autobiography of the poet of Nablus — a girl pulled out of school by the constraints of her own society, taught poetry at home by her brother, and turned by 1967 into the voice of a country.
Enter Ghost
Isabella Hammad · 2023
An actress returns to Palestine and joins a West Bank production of Hamlet — a novel about family, performance, and the work of making art under occupation.
I Saw Ramallah
Mourid Barghouti · 1997
A poet crosses the Allenby Bridge home after thirty years of exile — the most beloved Palestinian memoir of return.
Minor Detail
Adania Shibli · 2017
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 · 2006
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 · 2007
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 · 2017
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 · 2017
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.
Wild Thorns
Sahar Khalifeh · 1976
The first Arabic novel to show everyday life under the occupation from inside it — a fighter comes home to Nablus to find his own people adjusted to the thing he came to blow up.
Edward Said on Oslo: The Morning After
Edward W. Said
So first of all let us call the agreement by its real name: an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles.
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.
The Abdul Hadi family
Nablus / Jenin (Arraba) · 18th century to present
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 · 17th century to present
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 · 20th century
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 · 20th century to present
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 · 18th century to present
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.
Bethlehem Mother-of-Pearl
craft
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
craft
The hand-blown glass of Hebron — blue, green, and amber vessels shaped for centuries in family factories beside the old city.
Knafeh Nabulsiyeh
cuisine
Nablus's dessert of salty white cheese under orange pastry, drenched in syrup and cut from a tray the width of a table.
Maftoul
cuisine
Palestinian couscous, rolled by hand between the palms from bulgur and wheat flour — a grain that has to be made by somebody, and so is made in kitchens from Jenin to Kuwait to Amman.
Nabulsi Soap
craft
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
craft
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 Hirbawi Loom
craft
A weaving shed in Hebron, opened in 1961, that is the last place in Palestine where the Palestinian keffiyeh is still made.
The Qabbeh
craft
The embroidered square at the chest of a Palestinian dress — worked separately, moved from dress to dress, and the single clearest statement of which district a woman came from.
The Shatweh
craft
The tall coin-covered cap of Bethlehem, Beit Jala, Beit Sahour and Lifta — worn by married women, and carrying the coins of her own dowry on her head.
The Smadeh
craft
The Ramallah coin cap — a padded ring packed with silver, worn under the veil, and a woman's own cash reserve carried on her head.
The Thobe
craft
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.
Canaan Palestine
Fair-trade food from ancient trees · Jenin, West Bank
Palestinian fair-trade food brand selling olive oil from trees over two thousand years old, plus maftoul, freekeh, za'atar, and other farm products.
Listed onMakers — this collection has no page per entry.
Darzah
Tatreez fashion from the West Bank · Zababdeh & the West Bank
A nonprofit social-enterprise brand: tatreez and tahriri embroidered fashion and accessories, 100% handmade by women artisans in the West Bank.
Listed onMakers — this collection has no page per entry.
El-Funoun
The troupe that kept dabke alive · Al-Bireh, West Bank
Palestine's pioneering popular dance troupe since 1979 — preserving and performing dabke and folklore, founder of the Popular Art Centre.
Listed onMakers — this collection has no page per entry.
Hirbawi
The last keffiyeh factory in Palestine · Hebron, West Bank
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.
Listed onMakers — this collection has no page per entry.
Lajee Center
Culture from Aida Camp · Aida Refugee Camp, Bethlehem
A community cultural center in Aida Refugee Camp running a music institute, library, kindergarten, and arts programmes for a new generation.
Listed onMakers — this collection has no page per entry.
Nöl Collective
Hyper-local fashion from Ramallah · Ramallah, West Bank
A Ramallah fashion collective co-creating garments with family-run sewing workshops, artisan studios, and women's cooperatives across Palestine.
Listed onMakers — this collection has no page per entry.
Palestinian Soap Cooperative
Nablus olive-oil soap, cooperatively · Nablus, West Bank
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.
Listed onMakers — this collection has no page per entry.
The Nablus Soap Company
The classic Nabulsi bar · Nablus, West Bank
Handmade traditional Nabulsi olive-oil soap — the classic paper-wrapped bar and its honey, rose, and pomegranate variants.
Listed onMakers — this collection has no page per entry.
Women in Hebron
A women's embroidery cooperative · Hebron, West Bank
A women's cooperative producing traditional Palestinian embroidery and handicrafts to economically empower women and their families in the Hebron area.
Listed onMakers — this collection has no page per entry.
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.
First Registration
legal
The single narrow route by which a Palestinian may still enter unregistered West Bank land in the tabu after Military Order 291 closed settlement of title — privately funded, parcel by parcel, with the evidentiary burden and the whole cost on the applicant.
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.
Military Order 291 (1968)
legal
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'.
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.
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.'
Tabu
legal
The land registry — from the Ottoman Turkish tapu, a title deed. The book in which ownership of a parcel is written down, carried from the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 through the British Mandate and Jordanian rule into the present. Most land in the West Bank has never been entered in it, and that absence is the hinge on which almost every modern land dispute turns.
Wikala Dawriyya
legal
The irrevocable power of attorney through which land in the West Bank was commonly sold under occupation, when registering a transfer at the tabu meant an intolerable wait. It made a piece of paper, rather than the register, the thing that moved land — and it is the instrument at the centre of the fraud cases.
Calling Israel an apartheid state is a slander with no basis in law
legal
Apartheid is a defined crime, not an epithet. The Rome Statute, Article 7(2)(h), defines 'the crime of apartheid' as 'inhumane acts... committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.' Israel's own B'Tselem (January 2021), Human Rights Watch (April 2021) and Amnesty International (February 2022) each concluded that the definition is met, and on 19 July 2024 the International Court of Justice held that Israel's legislation and measures in the West Bank and East Jerusalem 'constitute a breach of Article 3 of CERD,' the article that condemns racial segregation and apartheid.
It is a conflict between two equal sides, both with legitimate grievances
rhetoric
One side holds sovereignty over the other. On 19 July 2024 the International Court of Justice found, by eleven votes to four, that 'the State of Israel's continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful,' and by fourteen to one that Israel must 'cease immediately all new settlement activities, and to evacuate all settlers.' In Area C — over 60 per cent of the West Bank — a UN OCHA factsheet produced in October 2018 recorded some 300,000 Palestinians living in 532 residential areas — figures its own charts label 2013 — alongside 400,000 Israeli settlers in about 230 settlements, with less than 1 per cent of Area C covered by an approved Palestinian planning scheme and under 3 per cent of Palestinian building permit applications approved between 2009 and 2016.
The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity — they always reject peace
history
The Palestine National Council accepted Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 and declared Palestinian statehood on 15 November 1988, an offer to settle on 22 per cent of historic Palestine; the Arab Peace Initiative of 28 March 2002 offered Israel, from every Arab state, an end to the conflict and 'normal relations' in exchange for withdrawal to the 1967 lines, a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and a 'just and agreed solution to the Palestine refugee problem in accordance with United Nations General Assembly resolution 194 (III).' Both stood unanswered. Meanwhile the settler population Israel maintains in the occupied territory reached about 465,000 in the West Bank and 230,000 in East Jerusalem by 2023.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Norwegian Refugee Council — Information, Counselling and Legal Assistance (ICLA), Palestine
Norwegian Refugee Council
NRC's legal-aid programme in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza: free information, counselling and representation on housing, land and property — demolition, eviction and confiscation orders, access restrictions, and documentation.
The West Bank is not a bystander — trauma among Palestinian undergraduates during the war on Gaza
Israa Baker, Azzam Zrineh, Mohammad AL Qadire, Mayyasah Ramadan, Hameeda Abu Sneineh, Elham Kateeb and Salam Khatib, Scientific Reports
A cross-sectional study of 819 undergraduates recruited primarily at seven West Bank universities, conducted February to April 2024. 87.2% reported psychological distress and 51.9% met criteria for PTSD or complex PTSD — and 97.4% had not received specialist mental health support during the conflict period.
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 Health Emergency Appeal 2026 — one million people needing mental health support
World Health Organization, occupied Palestinian territory
WHO's 2026 emergency appeal for the occupied Palestinian territory, which puts the mental health need in the Gaza Strip at an estimated one million people, and records that West Bank mental health needs are acute — set against a health system in which only half of Gaza's hospitals are partially functional and 48% of primary care centres are operating.
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.
Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association
Addameer, Ramallah · document
The standing record of Palestinian political imprisonment since 1991: detainee statistics, case files, fact sheets on administrative detention and the military court system, and the legal aid casework that produces the evidence.
Al-Haq
Al-Haq, Ramallah · document
Documenting the occupation from Ramallah since 1979: field accounts, fieldwork and monthly reports, legal position papers organised by forum, a publications library, and a forensic architecture investigations unit.
BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights
BADIL Resource Center, Bethlehem · document
The reference source on Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons since 1998: the recurring worldwide survey that produces the standing global figures, position papers on forcible transfer and population policy, annual reports back to 1999, and a public library.
The B'Tselem Video Archive
B'Tselem — The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories · film
Filmed documentation of the occupation gathered since 1989 and organised by channel — Gaza, East Jerusalem, minors, settler violence, Israeli forces — alongside statistics, testimonies, position papers and reports.
The Institute for Palestine Studies
Institute for Palestine Studies, Beirut / Ramallah / Washington · document
Founded in 1963: a four-storey research library in Beirut of more than 79,000 volumes, the Journal of Palestine Studies, and a growing bank of open digital projects including the Palestine Chronology.
Where this thread crosses others
Counted on records the two threads actually share, not on words they have in common.
A thread is a reading order, not a boundary — every record above belongs to other threads too.