Draw a line around roughly 60 percent of the West Bank and you have Area C — the territory where Israel retained full civil and military control under the 1995 Oslo II Accord. For the approximately 300,000 Palestinians who live there, that administrative fact shapes almost everything: whether a family can build a room onto their house, whether a village can connect to a water main, whether a community survives at all.
What the Oslo Accords Actually Created
The West Bank was divided into three administrative zones under the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement signed in September 1995. Area A — covering the major Palestinian cities — was placed under Palestinian Authority civil and security control. Area B, a patchwork of towns and villages, split civil administration between the PA and Israel, with Israeli security primacy. Area C, the largest single zone, remained under exclusive Israeli control across both dimensions: land use planning, building permits, infrastructure, and military enforcement all run through Israeli bodies.
The arrangement was explicitly designed as temporary, a transitional framework pending final-status negotiations. Nearly three decades later, the borders have barely moved. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA oPt), Area C constitutes approximately 60 percent of the West Bank’s land mass — around 3.3 million dunams. It contains virtually all of the Jordan Valley, the majority of the agricultural land, the main aquifers, and the contiguous corridors that would be essential to any viable Palestinian state.
Who Actually Lives in Area C — and Under What Conditions
Israeli settlements and their associated infrastructure occupy large portions of Area C. The Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics has recorded the settler population in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem) at well over 450,000. The Palestinian population living in Area C is harder to count with precision; OCHA oPt has consistently used a figure in the range of 300,000, distributed across roughly 532 communities, many of them small herding or farming villages with roots predating the Oslo framework.
The asymmetry in how the two populations experience Area C is structural. Israeli settlers live under Israeli civil law, with access to Israeli planning courts, Israeli municipal budgets, and Israeli infrastructure grids. Palestinians in Area C fall under military law administered by the Israeli Civil Administration (ICA), a body that has operated under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) since 1981. Rights group B’Tselem has documented that the ICA administers two distinct legal regimes across the same territory, one for Jewish Israelis and one for Palestinians, with profoundly different outcomes on land access and construction rights.
The Permit System and the Architecture of Denial
Palestinians wishing to build in Area C must obtain permits from the ICA. In practice, the system functions as near-total denial. Israeli planning NGO Bimkom — Planners for Planning Rights has documented that the vast majority of Area C is zoned in ways that make Palestinian construction legally impossible: much of the land is designated as agricultural land, nature reserves, firing zones, or “state land” — categories that exclude Palestinian residential or community development almost by definition, while often accommodating settlement expansion.
OCHA oPt data shows that between 2016 and 2018, Palestinians submitted 1,485 building permit applications to the ICA. Only 21 were approved — an approval rate of roughly 1.4 percent. The broader record across the Oslo period is similarly stark. Without permits, any Palestinian structure — a home, a school, a solar panel array, a water cistern — is at permanent risk of a demolition order.
OCHA oPt recorded 952 Palestinian-owned structures demolished in Area C in 2022 alone, displacing more than 1,300 people. Among the structures regularly targeted are those built with European donor funding intended to provide basic services to isolated communities. The European Union and individual member states have formally protested the demolition of donor-funded infrastructure, with limited effect.
Masafer Yatta: A Community Facing Erasure
No case in recent years has drawn more international attention to Area C’s human cost than Masafer Yatta, a cluster of small Palestinian hamlets in the South Hebron Hills. Roughly 1,000 to 1,200 people — farmers and semi-nomadic herders — have lived in these communities for generations. In 1981, the Israeli military designated much of the area as Firing Zone 918, ordering residents to leave. The communities resisted, arguing they had lived there before the designation was issued.
The case wound through Israeli courts for over two decades. In May 2022, Israel’s Supreme Court upheld the military’s authority to enforce the firing zone designation, ruling that residents had not proven permanent residency prior to 1981 to the court’s satisfaction. Human rights organisations including Al-Haq, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International condemned the ruling and the subsequent demolitions as forcible transfer — a grave breach of international humanitarian law under the Fourth Geneva Convention. B’Tselem described the situation as a deliberate policy of displacing Palestinians to consolidate Israeli control of strategic land.
Since the ruling, demolitions and displacement operations in Masafer Yatta have continued intermittently, drawing repeated statements from the UN and diplomatic protests from the United States and European governments. The communities have not been fully evacuated, but the legal basis for their existence under Israeli military law was effectively removed by the court’s decision.
What International Law Says About Area C
Israel’s administration of Area C is contested at every level of international law. The Fourth Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory, prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into occupied territory — the foundational legal argument against settlements — and equally prohibits the forcible transfer of the occupied population. UN Security Council Resolution 2334, adopted in December 2016, reaffirmed that Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, have no legal validity and constitute a flagrant violation of international law.
In January 2024, the International Court of Justice began hearings on Israel’s obligations as an occupying power in the Palestinian territory, following a request from the UN General Assembly. The ICJ’s advisory opinion, delivered in July 2024, found Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory to be unlawful and called for its end — a ruling that encompasses the administrative architecture of Area C in full.
For the Palestinians living in firing zones, permit-denied villages, and communities under demolition orders, these legal frameworks represent an argument that has not yet translated into protection. Area C land control remains, day to day, a question answered not by international courts but by the ICA officer who stamps — or does not stamp — a permit application.
Sources
- OCHA oPt, Humanitarian Factsheet on Area C of the West Bank, various years — ochaopt.org
- Bimkom — Planners for Planning Rights, The Prohibited Zone: Israeli Planning Policy in the Palestinian Villages in Area C
- B’Tselem, A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid (January 2021)
- Al-Haq, statements on Masafer Yatta and forcible transfer, 2022–2023
- Human Rights Watch, “Masafer Yatta: Israel Orders Palestinians off Their Land” (2022)
- UN Security Council Resolution 2334 (December 2016)
- International Court of Justice, Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences Arising from Israel’s Policies and Practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (July 2024)
- Fourth Geneva Convention (1949), Articles 49, 53
- Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (Oslo II), September 1995
