{"id":60393,"date":"2026-10-05T22:55:12","date_gmt":"2026-10-05T19:55:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peacenow.org.il\/?p=60393"},"modified":"2026-10-05T22:59:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-05T19:59:11","slug":"new-allocation-procedure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peacenow.org.il\/en\/new-allocation-procedure","title":{"rendered":"Following Peace Now Petition, New Procedure Published for Prior Disclosure of Land Allocations in the West Bank"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Civil Administration last week published a new procedure<\/a> requiring the government to publicly announce land allocations in the West Bank before they are finalized. The change gives the public an opportunity to challenge an allocation or ask that the land be assigned to another party before binding contracts are signed and before changes on the ground become a fait accompli.<\/p>\n

The new rules follow years of legal action by Peace Now, which has demanded transparency in the allocation of land in the Occupied Territories. The procedure applies only to land outside the jurisdiction of Israeli settlements. But, for the first time, it requires the Civil Administration to publish in advance any intention to allocate land \u2014 including renewals of existing allocations, allocations of absentee property and allocations of land that was owned by Jews before 1948.<\/p>\n

\n

Peace Now: For nearly 60 years, the State of Israel has treated land in the West Bank as if it could do whatever it wanted with it, without transparency and outside the rules of proper administration. As a result, the authorities have allocated <\/em>approximately 99.76 percent<\/a> of the land<\/em> to Israelis, while Palestinians have received virtually none. This is one of the reasons Israel has been accused of maintaining an apartheid regime in the Territories. Had there been even minimal transparency in the government’s conduct there, officials might not have dared to act in such a blatant and discriminatory manner.
\nThe road to genuine transparency remains long. The new procedure does not cover roughly half a million dunams within the jurisdiction of Israeli settlements, nor the hundreds of thousands of dunams transferred by the government to the <\/em>Settlement Division<\/em><\/a>. Peace Now is continuing its legal battle to require disclosure of those allocations as well.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

<\/h3>\n

The Fight for Transparency<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In 2015, Peace Now petitioned<\/a> Israel’s High Court of Justice, demanding that all land allocations in the West Bank be made public in real time, giving the public an opportunity to scrutinize and challenge them. The case moved slowly. Four years and several hearings later, the state announced<\/a> that, as a matter of principle, land allocations would be made public and established a procedure<\/a> for their publication. The court accepted the arrangement and dismissed<\/a>\u00a0the petition.<\/p>\n

But the procedure<\/a> left most allocations out of public view. It applied only to new allocations<\/strong> outside settlement jurisdictions and contained a long list of exceptions that effectively hollowed out the state’s commitment to transparency.<\/p>\n

In March 2021, Peace Now filed a new petition<\/a>, represented by attorneys Michael Sfard and Alon Sapir, seeking to expand the procedure to all land allocations.<\/p>\n

In December 2024, the High Court largely accepted<\/a> the petitioners’ arguments, ordering the state to publish in advance the renewal of existing allocations, allocations of absentee property and allocations of land that had been owned by Jews before 1948.<\/p>\n

The court was sharply critical of the way the state manages land in the West Bank. Justice Uzi Fogelman wrote:<\/p>\n

\n

“It has more than once become clear that the land could not have been allocated at all \u2026 [and that]<\/span> the allocation was unlawful \u2026 The factual and legal complexity surrounding real estate in the region, together with the fundamental differences in the way such property is administered compared with real estate in Israel, leads me, in my view, to conclude that the position of the state respondents, which regards the process of renewing an allocation as merely a technical matter, cannot be accepted \u2026
\nGiven the complex reality surrounding real estate in the region, appropriate weight must be given to the fact that publication of a renewed allocation may constitute a substantive and essential component in ensuring transparency, fairness and legal certainty in the administration of real estate. Although the renewal process may sometimes be relatively simple and primarily technical, under certain circumstances it may expose flaws and irregularities in the original allocations.”<\/em> (Sections 39\u201340 of the judgment<\/a>).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Yet the Civil Administration did not change its publication procedure to comply with the ruling. It took another two years \u2014 and repeated reminders \u2014 for the new procedure<\/a> to finally be published.<\/p>\n

\n

Settlement Division Allocations: The Transparency Fight Continues<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Over the years, the government has transferred hundreds of thousands of dunams in the West Bank to the Settlement Division<\/a>, granting it authority to manage the land and allocate it to third parties.<\/p>\n

The Settlement Division does not charge for the land it allocates and operates without effective government oversight. It has also been involved in allocating privately owned Palestinian land<\/strong> to settlers.<\/strong> In recent years, illegal settler grazing outposts have proliferated, many of them operating across thousands of dunams allocated by the Settlement Division to individual settlers for grazing or agriculture \u2014 without a tender, without payment and without transparency.<\/p>\n

Illegal settler agricultural outposts have become a major driver of violence against Palestinians and of the systematic dispossession of Palestinians from their land in the West Bank. Allocations by the Settlement Division give settlers a legal veneer and institutional backing to take control of land and push Palestinians out of surrounding areas. See The Bad Samaritan<\/a>, a joint report by Peace Now and Kerem Navot on Settlement Division allocations to violent farm outposts.<\/p>\n

In its original petition seeking transparency in land allocations, Peace Now also demanded that Settlement Division allocations be published in advance. But during a hearing on April 7, 2022, High Court justices said that the issue was distinct and should be addressed in a separate petition. Peace Now subsequently filed another petition<\/a>, this time demanding transparency in Settlement Division allocations.<\/p>\n

The petition, filed in the summer of 2022, is still pending. In October 2024, after two hearings, the Settlement Division told the court that, in response to the court’s comments, it intended to establish a procedure for publishing its allocations.<\/p>\n

It was not until January 2026 that the Settlement Division finally presented the court with a procedure. It consisted of a short paragraph stating that allocations would be published online, without specifying whether they would be published in advance, which allocations would be disclosed or when.<\/p>\n

The court has therefore scheduled another hearing, expected to take place on November 2, 2026 (HCJ 4976\/22).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Civil Administration last week published a new procedure requiring the government to publicly announce land allocations in the West Bank before they are finalized. The change gives the public an opportunity to challenge an allocation or ask that the land be assigned to another party before binding contracts are signed and before changes on… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":15788,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2515,16],"tags":[3018,4372,4373,2997,4374,2398],"class_list":["post-60393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lands-en","category-settlement-watch","tag-land-allocation","tag-land-allocation-2","tag-settlement-division-2","tag-settlement-division","tag-transparency-2","tag-transparency"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacenow.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacenow.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacenow.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacenow.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacenow.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60393"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/peacenow.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60399,"href":"https:\/\/peacenow.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60393\/revisions\/60399"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacenow.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacenow.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacenow.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacenow.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}