Israel to restart land registration in West Bank. What that means
A Palestinian demonstrator confronts Israeli security forces during a protest against the expropriation of Palestinian land by Israel in the village of Kfar Qaddum, West Bank, 7 October 2022
Priyanka Shankar writes in Al Jazeera on 16 February 2026:
The Israeli government has approved a plan to begin land registration in the occupied West Bank, meaning it will be able to seize land from Palestinians who cannot prove ownership.
For the first time since Israel’s occupation of the West Bank in 1967, it will register such land as property of the state – also known as settlement of land title – in Area C of the occupied West Bank. Area C is the part of the West Bank that remains under direct Israeli control. It covers about 60 percent of the West Bank.
According to Israeli media, Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, who submitted the proposal to restart land registration with Minister of Justice Yariv Levin and Minister of Defence Israel Katz, said the move was a continuation of “the settlement revolution to control all our lands”.
The Palestinian Authority presidency said the decision amounts to “de facto annexation” of the West Bank. It is the formalisation of the ongoing process of building settlements in the West Bank in violation of international law over the past several decades.
Here’s what we know about how this could be implemented:
Palestinian centres in the occupied West Bank
What does the land registration process mean?
During Jordanian control of the West Bank from 1949 to 1967, the administration primarily followed the British Mandate of land ownership, under which land was registered as state or private property.
But only about one-third of the land in the West Bank was formally registered under this process. Large numbers of Palestinians living in the region had no documentation or other means of proving they owned their own land. Many of them had also lost documents or they had been destroyed during the 1967 six-day Arab-Israeli war, which resulted in the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.
When Israel took control of the West Bank, it discontinued the process of land registration.
Now, the government has decided to restart the land registration, a move that many Israeli human rights groups and political analysts have condemned. Xavier Abu Eid, a political analyst based in the West Bank, described the Israeli government’s move as a “de facto annexation of Palestinian territory”.
“What they are doing is the implementation of annexation, packaging it as a mere bureaucratic process,” he told Al Jazeera. He added that it reaffirms the idea that “there is a colonial power that sets two different sets of legislation depending on ethnic and religious identity, defined also as apartheid.”
Where will land registration be implemented?