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Palestinian Refugees and the Right of Return Under International Law

Somewhere in a refugee camp in Lebanon or Jordan, an elderly Palestinian woman keeps a iron key on a chain around her neck. The house it once opened no longer stands — or stands, but belongs to someone else now, in a village renamed on maps that no longer carry the Arabic. The key has become one of the most recognizable symbols of the Palestinian condition: the insistence that a door, however distant, remains unlocked by international law, if not by politics.

That legal claim — the Palestinian right of return — is among the most contested and most frequently misrepresented questions in international affairs. It is also among the most clearly grounded in documented sources. Understanding it requires tracing three interlocking threads: the 1948 expulsion itself, the international legal framework that followed, and the domestic Israeli legislation that converted dispossession into a durable property regime.

The Scale of Displacement: From 1948 to 5.9 Million Registered Refugees

Between late 1947 and the armistice agreements of 1949, approximately 750,000 Palestinians — roughly half the Arab population of Mandatory Palestine — were expelled from or fled their homes during the war that Israelis call the War of Independence and Palestinians call the Nakba, “the catastrophe.” Around 530 towns and villages were depopulated and largely destroyed, according to research compiled by the late Palestinian geographer Salman Abu Sitta in his Atlas of Palestine 1917–1966 and the accompanying Palestine Land Society databases. Abu Sitta’s meticulous cartographic work documented the precise location of pre-1948 villages, the fate of their populations, and — crucially — the current land use on those sites, arguing that the majority of depopulated land remains sparsely developed and physically returnable.

Today, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) registers approximately 5.9 million Palestinian refugees across its five fields of operation: Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza. UNRWA’s mandate, renewed repeatedly by the UN General Assembly, extends to descendants of the original 1948 displaced persons — a provision consistent with established international practice for protracted refugee situations and with UNHCR guidance on hereditary refugee status in the absence of durable solutions. These 5.9 million people do not exhaust the full Palestinian diaspora; the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) has estimated the total Palestinian population worldwide, including those not registered with UNRWA, at well over 13 million.

UNGA Resolution 194 and the International Legal Baseline

On 11 December 1948 — six months after Israel declared statehood — the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 194 (III). Paragraph 11 is the operative clause that Palestinian and international legal advocates cite most frequently. It resolves that:

“the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.”

Resolution 194 has been reaffirmed by the General Assembly more than 130 times. Israel’s admission to UN membership in May 1949 was conditioned, in General Assembly Resolution 273 (III), on its acceptance of the obligations set out in Resolution 194 — a linkage that legal scholars including Noura Erakat, in her book Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), have argued carries particular weight.

Critics note that General Assembly resolutions are not legally binding in the same way as Security Council resolutions adopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. This is accurate as a formal matter. But international lawyers also point to the broader body of refugee and human rights law that independently supports the right. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 13) enshrines the right to return to one’s country. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Article 12(4)), to which Israel is a party, states that no one shall be “arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country.” The UN Human Rights Committee, in its General Comment No. 27, has interpreted “own country” broadly, encompassing persons with strong ties — including former habitual residence — to a territory, not merely citizens in the strict sense. Al-Haq, the West Bank–based human rights organization, and Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights have documented these overlapping legal bases in detail.

The Absentees’ Property Law: Dispossession Encoded in Statute

While the international framework was being constructed, the Israeli state was simultaneously enacting the domestic legislation that would make displacement permanent. The Absentees’ Property Law of 1950 is the legal mechanism that transferred Palestinian refugee property to Israeli state control.

The law defined an “absentee” with sweeping breadth: any person who, between 29 November 1947 and the end of the official state of emergency, was a citizen or resident of an Arab League state, or was present in any part of Mandatory Palestine that was not under Israeli control, or who left their ordinary place of residence for any reason — including flight during active hostilities. Under this definition, Palestinians who had fled the fighting and were sheltering in another part of what became Israel could be classified as absentees with respect to their original homes, producing what legal scholars came to call the “present absentee” category: people who remained within Israel’s borders but were stripped of their property regardless.

Property classified under the law was transferred to the Custodian of Absentee Property and subsequently, in large part, to the Jewish National Fund and the Israel Land Authority, placing it in a holding structure that, by JNF charter, cannot be sold or leased to non-Jews. Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel has documented the ongoing application of the Absentees’ Property Law, including its extension — via the 2010 legal opinion of then-Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein — to Palestinian property in East Jerusalem. Bimkom — Planners for Planning Rights and Ir Amim have both mapped the law’s role in ongoing dispossession in the city.

The combined effect is structural: UNGA 194 establishes a right of return and compensation under international law; the Absentees’ Property Law simultaneously transfers the underlying assets to entities that cannot legally return them, creating a legal lock that no individual refugee can undo through domestic Israeli courts.

Salman Abu Sitta and the Feasibility Argument

Beyond the legal question lies a political one: is return physically possible? Abu Sitta spent decades arguing that it is. His Atlas of Palestine and the research platform of the Palestine Land Society calculated that the lands of depopulated Palestinian villages are today largely in the hands of the state of Israel, the JNF, or regional councils — not densely settled Jewish Israeli communities. He argued that approximately 88 percent of Israeli Jews live on roughly 15 percent of Israeli-controlled land, and that the areas from which most refugees originate are not heavily developed. His methodology has been contested by Israeli demographers and by some international scholars, but his cartographic archive — now held at the Palestine Museum — remains the most granular spatial documentation of pre-1948 Palestinian habitation available.

A Right Deferred Is Not a Right Dissolved

International law does not set a statute of limitations on the right of return. The UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine, established by Resolution 194 itself, has remained technically in existence — dormant, but not dissolved — since 1948. Each annual General Assembly reaffirmation of Resolution 194 restates what the international community has repeatedly recognized: that this refugee population retains a claim, and that compensation for those who choose not to return remains an obligation on those responsible.

For the woman with the key — and for the 5.9 million registered with UNRWA, and for the millions more beyond that register — the legal framework exists. What has been absent, across more than seven decades, is the political will to enforce it.

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