Land Rights Under Attack in Area C of West Bank

Israel’s recent cancellation of all Palestinian land records in Area C marks a strong escalation in efforts to erase Palestinian land rights. By denying recognition to generations-old deeds, this bureaucratic move pushes entire communities towards dispossession and deepens the crisis of settlement expansion. What’s at stake is nothing less than the future of Palestinian presence in their own homeland.

Area C makes up nearly 60% of the West Bank and has remained under full Israeli military and administrative control since the Oslo Accords of the 1990s. Although Palestinian families have lived, farmed, and built in this territory for generations, Israel controls all zoning, infrastructure, and land registration.

For decades, the Palestinian Authority has issued local deeds and documents to help communities record their land rights. Israel, however, has consistently refused to recognize these registries while simultaneously expanding illegal settlements.

In May 2025, the Israeli government took a drastic step: it cancelled recognition of any Palestinian land records in Area C and declared that only the Israeli civil land registry system would be considered valid. This unilateral move effectively erases Palestinian ownership rights on paper, even where families hold Ottoman-era deeds, British Mandate records, or Jordanian-era land titles.

Human rights groups and UN bodies have condemned the move as a form of de facto annexation—that is, claiming sovereignty over occupied territory, in violation of international law (Fourth Geneva Convention, UNSC Resolutions 242, 338, 2334). Legal experts warn this amounts to a bureaucratic mechanism of dispossession, designed to achieve what settlement expansion and military rule have already carried out on the ground.

From May 2025 onward, all Palestinian deeds, inheritance documents, and tax records issued by the Palestinian Authority for Area C land are no longer legally valid. Instead, Palestinians are required to prove ownership through the Israeli registry system—an institution designed to exclude them.

This system relies on strict evidentiary standards, often requiring original documentation from the Ottoman (pre-1917), British Mandate (1917–1948), or Jordanian (1948–1967) periods. Few Palestinian families can meet these requirements because of displacement, document loss, lack of recognition by Israeli courts, or simply the systematic refusal to process Palestinian claims.

The practical effect is that Palestinians are stripped of their land rights while settlers and settlement councils gain exclusive legal recognition. It clears the way for confiscations, demolitions, and formal reallocation of land to Jewish settlements—policies long criticized by the UN and major rights organizations as components of an apartheid regime.

The governorate of Tulkarm illustrates the devastating local impact of this policy. About 41% of Tulkarm’s land lies in Area C (UN OCHA, 2024). Rural families depend on this land for agriculture, greenhouse farming, and herding.

Since 2024, Tulkarm has faced a sharp escalation in settler violence, land confiscation, and demolitions:

• Greenhouse destruction: In late 2024 and early 2025, settlers—often with military escort—destroyed dozens of Palestinian-owned greenhouses in Tulkarm villages such as Shufa, Kafr al-Labad, and al-Ras. Local NGOs and UN OCHA documented attacks where plastic tunnels and irrigation systems worth tens of thousands of shekels were set ablaze or bulldozed.
  
  
• Building permits denied: Israeli authorities rejected nearly all Palestinian applications for building or farming permits in Tulkarm’s Area C villages in 2023–2024 (OCHA Data, 2024). Families building basic agricultural structures like water cisterns or farm shacks received stop-work or demolition orders instead.
  
  
• Settler expansion: Tulkarm is hemmed in by the Avnei Hefetz and Enav settlements to the east, both of which have expanded aggressively onto surrounding village land since 2020. New settler outposts appeared between 2022–2024, further cutting access to Palestinian agricultural areas.
  

When the cancellation of Palestinian registration came into effect in May 2025, families in Tulkarm suddenly lost even the symbolic recognition of their land deeds by the Palestinian Authority. Without international protection, they are now forced into a legal void: their records are invalid, their land claims unrecognized, and their only recourse is through Israeli military courts where the outcome is almost always dispossession.

This means that Palestinian growers in Tulkarm cannot register their land, cannot defend against settler land grabs, and cannot legally expand their farms or homes. In practice, it is a bureaucratic weapon of erasure pushing families off their land.

• International law: Israel’s policy violates the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits the occupying power from altering land administration to benefit its own civilians.
  
  
• Human impact: Families in Tulkarm and across Area C face the loss of their only assets—their land and homes—essential for food security, cultural continuity, and economic survival.
  
  
• Systematic dispossession: By combining settlement expansion, building restrictions, physical attacks, and now the invalidation of deeds, Israel is entrenching a regime of apartheid and forcible transfer.

• Establish international monitoring and protective presence in high risk areas in area C.
• Push the UN to condemn these violations and established a commission of inquiry into land theft in Area C
• Hold Israeli government accountable through targeted sanctions on illegal Israeli settlements products and officials responsible for land dispossession.
• Ensure donor governments and international institutions recognize Palestinian issued land records as legitimate.
• Increase funding for Palestinians NGO providing legal aid, land documentation. And farmer protection.
• Establish the protection mechanism to ensure the protection of Palestinians land rights in Area C.
• Provide development support to area C communities.

• UN OCHA, Fragmented Lives: Humanitarian Overview of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, 2024
  
  
• B’Tselem, State Business: Israel’s Land Takeover in Area C, 2024
  
  
• Al-Haq, Escalating Settler Violence in Tulkarm Governorate, March 2025
  
  
• Haaretz, Israel Cancels Palestinian Land Registry in West Bank Area C, May 2025
  
  
• UN Human Rights Council Report of the Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the oPt, A/HRC/55/73, March 2024