A new Israeli digital registry imposes de facto sovereignty over 60% of the West Bank. Palestinians must register under Israeli authority or risk losing their land, but Israeli legal loopholes are designed to invalidate their claims either way.
BY QASSAM MUADDI JUNE 3, 2026
Israel’s annexation of the West Bank is moving full steam ahead on the ground, but it’s also going online. Last Wednesday, the Israeli government launched a new digital platform for registering lands in the West Bank, open for use by Israelis and Israeli corporations.
The new platform allows the registration of property and applies to lands in Area C of the West Bank, which comprises over 60% of the territory under the 1993 Oslo Accords. The rest of the West Bank is divided into Areas A and B, where the Palestinian Authority (PA) has varying degrees of civil and security control.
The launching of the platform comes on the heels of previous Israeli moves to alter how land ownership works in the West Bank, starting with an Israeli government decision in June 2025 to make Palestinian lands in Area C open to registration by anybody, including Israeli settlers. Since then, the Israeli government has taken several more steps to advance its annexation of the West Bank — not only with laws that lay the groundwork for annexation, but by exercising actual Israeli authorityover Palestinian lands.
Now, these measures have moved to the digital realm, making it even easier for Israelis to take control of Palestinian land in the West Bank. The PA has already condemned the online Israeli land registry as “a step towards actual annexation,” calling upon Palestinians to refrain from using the platform.
Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Israeli Knesset member Orit Strock, both hardline supporters of the Israeli settler movement, called the project “a fundamental pillar of implementing [Israeli] sovereignty” over the West Bank.
Land grabs and legal loopholes
In theory, the new land registration platform is open to both Israelis and Palestinians, but with several caveats that render the likelihood of Israel accepting Palestinian property ownership claims exceedingly low, despite the presence of documentation and land deeds. According to Khalil Tafakji, a Palestinian geographer and expert on Israeli settlements, Israel might reject these claims based on a technicality inherent in an old Israeli law regarding the property of “absentees.” In 1950, Israel passed the Absentee Property Law, which legalized the state’s confiscation of the lands of the over 700,000 Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed from their homes in 1948, defining the forcibly displaced refugees as “absentees” residing outside of what became Israel.