On any detailed map of the West Bank, a patchwork of shading tells a story that four words — “Palestinian Authority–controlled territory” — have never quite managed to tell accurately. The land is divided into three administrative zones, established by the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, commonly called Oslo II. Three decades later, those zones have hardened from a declared temporary arrangement into the defining architecture of Palestinian life under occupation.
Understanding what Areas A, B, and C actually mean — not on paper, but on the ground — requires following the lines across villages, fields, quarries, and construction sites, and asking who holds the permit book.
What Oslo II Created
Oslo II, signed in Taba, Egypt on 28 September 1995, subdivided the West Bank into three categories. Area A was placed under full Palestinian Authority civil and security control. Area B was placed under Palestinian civil control and joint Israeli-Palestinian security control. Area C — the largest category by a substantial margin — was placed under full Israeli civil and security control, with a stated expectation that further transfers to Palestinian jurisdiction would follow in subsequent “final status” negotiations.
Those transfers did not happen at any meaningful scale. What Oslo II bequeathed instead was a geography in which the Palestinian Authority administers roughly 40 percent of the West Bank’s land area across Areas A and B — most of it urban — while Israel retains exclusive control over the remaining 60 percent in Area C. Those figures are widely cited by OCHA oPt and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and they have remained essentially stable since the late 1990s.
Area A constitutes approximately 18 percent of the West Bank and contains the major Palestinian population centres: Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Jericho, and most of Hebron’s Palestinian-inhabited districts. Area B, approximately 22 percent, covers hundreds of smaller towns and villages where the PA handles civil administration but Israeli forces retain overriding security authority and freedom of movement. The practical meaning of “joint security control” in Area B has, in OCHA’s documentation, consistently meant Israeli forces operate there at will.
Area C: Where Sixty Percent of the Land Sits
Area C is where the structural consequences of Oslo II become most visible. It encompasses the Jordan Valley, the hills surrounding Palestinian urban centres, virtually all agricultural land that is not immediately adjacent to a village, and the full matrix of Israeli settlements and their associated road infrastructure.
According to OCHA oPt, approximately 300,000 Palestinians lived in Area C as of recent estimates, scattered across communities that predate Oslo by generations. They are outnumbered in that zone by a settler population that, according to Peace Now’s settlement data and the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, exceeded 470,000 people in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem) by the early 2020s — the vast majority of them in Area C.
The mechanisms that sustain this asymmetry are administrative as much as military. Building permits are the clearest example.
The Permit Asymmetry That Shapes Palestinian Villages
In Area C, planning and zoning authority rests entirely with the Israeli Civil Administration, a military body established in 1981. Palestinians in Area C must apply to the Civil Administration for construction permits. The Israeli planning rights organisation Bimkom — Planners for Planning Rights has documented in detail how the system is structured to produce refusals.
Palestinian communities in Area C have largely been confined to outline plans — many of them drawn up by Israeli authorities during the Jordanian or early Israeli administration period — that were never updated to reflect population growth. Bimkom’s research has shown that these plans allocated residential building zones covering a small fraction of each community’s actual land, leaving the majority of village territory classified in ways that make Palestinian construction legally impermissible. Applications that fall outside those narrow zones are refused; structures built without permits are subject to demolition orders.
OCHA oPt’s Protection of Civilians reporting has tracked the results year by year. Across recent years, Israeli authorities have demolished hundreds of Palestinian-owned structures in the West Bank annually, the majority in Area C, including homes, water cisterns, agricultural facilities, and donor-funded humanitarian infrastructure. The UN’s figures for 2022 recorded over 950 structures demolished or seized, displacing more than 1,100 Palestinians — figures that sit within a documented multi-year pattern, not an anomaly.
The contrast with the planning treatment of Israeli settlements in the same zone is stark. Settlement construction in Area C proceeds under a separate planning track administered by Israeli civilian ministries. Bimkom and Peace Now have both documented the difference in approval rates, zoning allocations, and infrastructure investment. Roads built for settlement access cross Area C freely; Palestinian villages in the same terrain frequently lack paved road connections to the nearest Palestinian town.
Movement, Contiguity, and What “Full PA Control” Means in Practice
Area A’s designation as under “full Palestinian Authority control” obscures a critical constraint: it is not contiguous. Palestinian-controlled territory exists as a series of islands surrounded by Area C. Any movement between Palestinian cities — between Ramallah and Nablus, between Jenin and Tulkarm — requires travelling through Area C, where Israeli military authority applies and where the checkpoint and permit system operates.
The human rights organisation Gisha and OCHA have both mapped how this non-contiguity functions as a structural limit on Palestinian economic and civic life. The Palestinian Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) has documented that Area C’s exclusion from Palestinian development planning — no Palestinian infrastructure projects can be approved there without Israeli Civil Administration authorisation — has effectively frozen the economic geography of the West Bank along lines that benefit the settlement economy while constraining Palestinian growth.
UNCTAD’s annual reports on the Palestinian economy have consistently identified restricted access to Area C land and resources as a primary driver of Palestinian economic under-development. The Jordan Valley alone — almost entirely Area C — contains some of the most fertile agricultural land in the region. Palestinian farmers there operate under a permit system that limits their access to land their families farmed before 1995.
Oslo II also created what legal scholar Noura Erakat has described as a framework that juridified Israeli control by dressing temporary administrative arrangements in the language of bilateral agreement — agreements that, critically, were signed under conditions of profound asymmetry between an occupying military power and a leadership without a state. The “temporary” designation has now lasted nearly thirty years.
A Framework Designed to Expire That Did Not
Oslo II’s interim zones were explicitly designed to dissolve into a final-status agreement. Article XI of the agreement anticipated further redeployments. Those redeployments did not materialise at scale, and successive Israeli governments — documented by Peace Now’s settlement monitoring — expanded settlement infrastructure throughout the period that was supposed to narrow Area C.
For Palestinians living in Area C villages — building without permits because permits are structurally unavailable, watching demolition orders accumulate on structures their grandparents built, unable to connect a water line without Civil Administration approval that rarely comes — the three-tier map is not a transitional administrative document. It is the landscape of daily life, encoded in stone and bureaucratic paper.
The zones were meant to be a scaffold. For a generation of Palestinians, they became the building.
Sources
- Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza Strip (Oslo II), 28 September 1995 — Annex I, Article XI
- OCHA oPt, Humanitarian Atlas / Protection of Civilians reporting, multiple years, ochaopt.org
- Bimkom — Planners for Planning Rights, The Prohibited Zone: Israeli Planning Policy in the Palestinian Villages of Area C, and related reports, bimkom.org
- Peace Now, Settlement Watch data and annual reports, peacenow.org.il
- UNCTAD, Report on UNCTAD Assistance to the Palestinian People, multiple years, unctad.org
- Gisha — Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, Area C access documentation, gisha.org
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), pcbs.gov.ps
- Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019)
- UN OHCHR, reporting on demolitions and displacement in the West Bank, ohchr.org
