The order arrives without warning, and without appeal. A military commander signs a document, and a Palestinian — a lawyer, a legislator, a family member of a detainee — is put on a vehicle and driven across a boundary they did not choose to cross. Under Israeli military administration, this practice has a bureaucratic name: “assigned residence outside the area.” Under international humanitarian law, it has another name: forcible transfer, prohibited absolutely by Article 49, paragraph 1 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Article 49(1) could not be clearer: “Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.” The International Committee of the Red Cross, in its authoritative commentary on the Convention, confirms that the prohibition admits no exceptions — not security, not military necessity, not administrative convenience. Palestinians in the West Bank, as residents of territory under belligerent occupation since 1967, are protected persons under the Convention’s terms.
Israel has contested this characterization for decades, arguing that the Convention does not apply de jure to the West Bank on the grounds that Jordan’s pre-1967 sovereignty was itself disputed. The Israeli Supreme Court has never fully resolved the question. The international community — including the United Nations Security Council, in resolutions such as Resolution 446 (1979) and Resolution 2334 (2016) — has consistently rejected that position, affirming the Convention’s applicability and calling on Israel to comply with its obligations.
What Deportation Looks Like in Practice
Deportation from the West Bank has taken several forms since 1967. In the early decades of occupation, Israel deported hundreds of Palestinian political figures, mayors, academics, and journalists outright — expelling them to Jordan, Lebanon, and beyond. After the Oslo Accords, formal mass deportations became rarer and more legally contested, but the mechanism did not disappear. It evolved. Military orders began to be used to transfer Palestinians from one part of the occupied territory to another — from the West Bank to Gaza, or from their home governorate to a distant one — in ways that human rights organizations argue constitute forcible transfer within the meaning of Article 49.
HaMoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual, an Israeli human rights organization based in Jerusalem, has documented and litigated dozens of these cases over three decades. HaMoked’s legal work — petitioning the Israeli Supreme Court on behalf of Palestinians facing deportation or assigned residence orders — constitutes one of the most detailed archives of individual cases available in English and Hebrew. The organization has consistently argued that transferring a Palestinian from the West Bank to Gaza, or holding a family member hostage to a geographically distant “assigned residence,” violates both the Fourth Geneva Convention and basic principles of proportionality.
The Case of Khalida Jarrar
Among the most extensively documented deportation cases of recent decades is that of Khalida Jarrar, a Palestinian Legislative Council member, prominent feminist, and senior figure in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In August 2015, Israeli military authorities issued Jarrar an order requiring her to relocate from her home in Ramallah to Jericho — a city roughly 35 kilometers away but, for a political figure with family, legal work, and community ties in Ramallah, effectively a form of internal exile. The order cited security grounds but provided no specifics that Jarrar or her lawyers could meaningfully contest.
Amnesty International designated Jarrar a prisoner of conscience following her subsequent arrest in 2017, noting that her detention and the earlier transfer order appeared designed to punish her political activity and silence her advocacy for Palestinian prisoners. Human Rights Watch documented the same pattern, observing that Israel has repeatedly used administrative and military orders against elected Palestinian officials in ways that circumvent ordinary criminal due process. Jarrar was arrested again in 2019 and held under administrative detention — imprisonment without charge or trial — before her release in 2021. Throughout, HaMoked was among the legal bodies tracking her case.
Abdul Halim Hasayen and the Transfer to Gaza
A starker form of forcible transfer — one that fits the textbook definition more precisely — involved Palestinians with West Bank residency who were ordered deported to Gaza. Abdul Halim Hasayen is among the named individuals whose case appears in HaMoked’s litigation record. Hasayen, a West Bank resident, faced military orders that would have transferred him to Gaza — a territory under separate military closure, with distinct civil registry records and no family connection for him. The move would have severed him from his community, his livelihood, and his legal status in the West Bank permanently.
HaMoked petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court on his behalf, arguing that transferring a West Bank resident to Gaza constitutes forcible transfer under Article 49 and cannot be justified on security grounds. The litigation forced a temporary freeze of the deportation order, illustrating both the legal vulnerability of the practice when challenged and the near-impossibility of challenge for Palestinians without access to Israeli legal representation. For every Hasayen whose case reached a court, human rights workers note, there are others whose transfers were completed before any petition could be filed.
A System Built on Bureaucratic Distance
What makes the deportation mechanism particularly difficult to document comprehensively is its deliberate opacity. Military orders are issued under authorities that date to British Mandate emergency regulations, adapted and expanded through Israeli military legislation. The orders are classified, the hearings — where they exist — are closed, and the individuals subject to them often learn of the decision only when soldiers appear at the door.
Al-Haq, the Ramallah-based human rights organization with UN ECOSOC consultative status, has argued in submissions to UN treaty bodies that this system of deportation and internal transfer is not a series of isolated administrative decisions but a component of a broader policy of demographic engineering in the occupied territory — one designed, over time, to alter the composition and concentration of the Palestinian population in ways that serve Israeli settlement and annexation objectives. That argument has found resonance in the work of scholars including Rashid Khalidi, whose The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine situates population transfer as a recurring instrument of the settler-colonial project, and Noura Erakat, whose Justice for Some examines the legal frameworks that have enabled such practices to continue with minimal international accountability.
For the individuals caught inside that system — a legislator ordered to Jericho, a West Bank resident ordered to Gaza, a family separated by a military commander’s signature — the abstraction of international law resolves into something very concrete: a door opening, an order read aloud, a life interrupted at a boundary drawn by someone else.
Sources
- Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 49 (1949); ICRC Commentary
- UN Security Council Resolution 446 (1979); Resolution 2334 (2016)
- HaMoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual — deportation and assigned residence case archive
- Amnesty International, Khalida Jarrar: Prisoner of Conscience (2017)
- Human Rights Watch, reporting on Palestinian Legislative Council members under administrative detention (2017–2021)
- Al-Haq, submissions to UN treaty bodies on forcible transfer in the occupied Palestinian territory
- Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (Metropolitan Books, 2020)
- Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019)
