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Natural Resources in the West Bank: Who Profits

The West Bank sits on considerable natural wealth. Its eastern edge borders the Dead Sea — one of the most mineral-rich bodies of water on earth, dense with potassium, magnesium, bromine, and the salts that have built a global cosmetics industry. Its hills contain limestone, dolomite, and gravel quarried in enormous quantities for construction across the region. By most measures of natural resource endowment, the territory should generate substantial revenue for the people who live on it. Instead, for more than five decades, the overwhelming share of that wealth has flowed outward — to Israeli companies, Israeli settlements, and the Israeli state — while the Palestinian population watches from a distance imposed by military administration.

This is not a contested interpretation. It is documented in legal filings, corporate registrations, satellite imagery, and the reports of Israeli human rights organisations working inside the system. The picture they draw is consistent: Palestinian access to West Bank natural resources is structurally blocked, and the extraction that does occur operates almost entirely to Palestinian economic exclusion.

The Dead Sea Shore and the Ahava Question

The settlement of Mitzpe Shalem sits on the western shore of the Dead Sea, inside the West Bank, established in 1970. For years it was home to a production facility operated by Ahava Dead Sea Laboratories — a cosmetics company whose products, marketed globally under the tagline of “authentic Dead Sea minerals,” were manufactured using mineral mud extracted from the occupied shoreline.

The legal problem was straightforward. Under international humanitarian law — specifically Article 55 of the Hague Regulations of 1907 and the Fourth Geneva Convention — an occupying power is prohibited from permanently appropriating or exploiting the natural resources of occupied territory beyond what military necessity and the benefit of the local population require. The commercial extraction of Dead Sea minerals for export, processed at a settlement built on land Palestinians cannot freely access, satisfies neither condition.

Human rights organisations and legal advocacy groups raised this point repeatedly. Who Profits, an Israeli research centre documenting corporate involvement in the occupation, published detailed profiles of Ahava’s supply chain, noting that the company’s principal shareholders at various points included the kibbutz movement associated with Mitzpe Shalem and settlement regional councils. The European Court of Justice ruled in 2016, in a case concerning product labelling, that goods from Israeli settlements could not be labelled as originating in Israel — a ruling with direct implications for products marketed as Israeli when manufactured in occupied territory.

Ahava eventually relocated its production facility out of Mitzpe Shalem, in part under the pressure of sustained international campaigns. But the mineral extraction itself — the sourcing of raw material from the Dead Sea’s western bank — continued to raise unresolved questions about the legal framework governing who holds extraction rights over a shoreline that runs through occupied Palestinian territory.

Eleven of Twelve: The Quarry Arithmetic

If the Dead Sea case is the most internationally visible example of resource extraction in the West Bank, the quarrying sector is the most numerically stark. The data comes substantially from Yesh Din — Volunteers for Human Rights, an Israeli legal organisation that has documented the operation of quarries in the West Bank in sustained detail.

Yesh Din’s research found that of the approximately twelve active quarries operating in the West Bank’s Area C — the roughly 60 percent of the territory under full Israeli civil and military control — eleven were operated by Israeli companies. The stone and aggregate extracted from those sites is transported primarily into Israel and used in Israeli construction projects. The royalties and tax revenues generated flow to Israeli state accounts, not to the Palestinian Authority or to Palestinian municipal budgets.

The scale matters. Yesh Din estimated, in its landmark 2015 report Backyard Proceedings, that Israeli quarrying operations in the West Bank extracted material worth hundreds of millions of shekels annually. Palestinians, meanwhile, are restricted in Area C from opening new quarries, expanding existing ones, or accessing the planning and permit system that would theoretically allow them to develop their own extractive industries. The Civil Administration — the Israeli military body that administers Area C — controls that permit system entirely.

“The Civil Administration grants licenses to Israeli companies to quarry in the West Bank,” Yesh Din concluded, “while at the same time denying Palestinians the ability to obtain licenses for quarrying in the same area.” The organisation argued that this constituted unlawful appropriation of natural resources under the laws of occupation.

Area C and the Architecture of Exclusion

The quarry statistics are inseparable from the broader structure of Area C, which was defined under the Oslo II Accord of 1995 as a temporary arrangement pending final status negotiations. More than thirty years later, it remains in place, encompassing the Jordan Valley, the eastern slopes, and most of the territory’s agricultural and resource-rich land.

UNCTAD — the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development — has repeatedly quantified what Palestinian exclusion from Area C costs. Its 2015 report estimated that Palestinian access to Area C could add as much as $3.4 billion annually to Palestinian GDP — a figure representing roughly 35 percent of the Palestinian economy at the time. A significant portion of that figure relates directly to natural resources: quarrying, mineral extraction, agricultural land, and the Dead Sea shore.

The mechanism of exclusion is not simply legal prohibition. It is also physical. Israeli settlement infrastructure, military zones, nature reserves designated under Israeli military orders, and the permit regime together create a landscape in which Palestinians in adjacent villages can see the quarrying operations and the mineral extraction facilities but cannot legally participate in them, work in them on equal terms, or capture any portion of the revenues they generate.

The Legal Framework and Its Limits

International humanitarian law is unambiguous in principle. The Hague Regulations and the Fourth Geneva Convention, both of which Israel is party to, prohibit pillage and the permanent exploitation of occupied territory’s resources. The International Court of Justice’s 2004 advisory opinion on the separation wall reaffirmed the applicability of both instruments to the West Bank. More recently, proceedings at the ICJ regarding the broader legal consequences of the occupation have brought resource exploitation back into the frame of international legal scrutiny.

In practice, enforcement has been absent. Israeli courts have declined to apply international humanitarian law directly in cases concerning settlement activity and resource use. The Civil Administration continues to issue extraction licenses. The products reach European and North American markets. The revenues accumulate.

For Palestinian communities in the Jordan Valley and the eastern West Bank — the farmers and herders and village councils who live alongside the quarries and the mineral operations — the legal framework offers clarity about what is happening to them. It has not, so far, stopped it.

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