On the morning of 28 June 1967 — three weeks after Israeli forces seized the West Bank in the June War — the Israeli government extended its law, jurisdiction, and administration to 70 square kilometres of Jordanian-administered land around the Old City of Jerusalem. The move was framed in bureaucratic language, passed without a formal declaration of annexation, and greeted almost immediately with international condemnation. More than five decades later, approximately 370,000 Palestinian Jerusalemites live inside that boundary, holding a legal status that grants them residency in their own city but not citizenship in the state that governs it — and that can be revoked.
The Mechanics of Annexation: June 1967 to the Basic Law of 1980
The initial legal instrument was an amendment to Israel’s Law and Administration Ordinance, passed on 27 June 1967, which authorised the government to apply Israeli law to “any part of Eretz Israel.” The following day, a proclamation brought East Jerusalem and surrounding villages — including Beit Hanina, Shu’fat, and parts of Bethlehem governorate — under Israeli municipal jurisdiction. The boundaries were drawn deliberately to include a maximum of land and a minimum of Palestinian population, as historian Meron Benvenisti and, later, Ir Amim have documented in detail.
The United Nations Security Council responded within weeks. Resolution 252 (1968) declared measures taken by Israel to change the status of Jerusalem “invalid,” and was followed by Resolutions 267 (1969), 271 (1969), and 298 (1971), each reaffirming that position. None produced compliance.
The formal legal capstone came on 30 July 1980, when the Israeli Knesset passed the Basic Law: Jerusalem, Capital of Israel. Its opening clause declared “Jerusalem, complete and united,” the capital of Israel — language understood internationally as the statutory annexation of the eastern, Palestinian part of the city. The Security Council responded within weeks with Resolution 478 (1980), adopted on 20 August by fourteen votes to none, with the United States abstaining. The resolution declared the Basic Law “null and void” and called on states that had located embassies in Jerusalem to withdraw them. Most did.
What International Law Says — and Why It Has Not Been Enforced
The legal framework governing East Jerusalem flows from several intersecting bodies of international law. The territory Israel occupied in June 1967 is treated by the international community, and by the International Court of Justice in its 2004 Advisory Opinion on the Wall, as occupied Palestinian territory subject to the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949). Article 49 of that Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into occupied territory — a provision the ICJ found Israel was violating through its settlement enterprise — and also prohibits the forcible transfer of the protected population out of the territory.
The annexation of occupied territory is further prohibited under the UN Charter’s prohibition on the acquisition of territory by force, articulated in Resolution 242 (1967). Noura Erakat, in her legal analysis Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), argues that the international legal architecture around Jerusalem is not merely aspirational: it creates concrete obligations for third states not to recognise or assist the annexation. In practice, those obligations have been inconsistently observed at best.
The 2024 ICJ Advisory Opinion on the broader legal consequences of Israel’s occupation — requested by the UN General Assembly — went further, concluding that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, is unlawful under international law and must end as rapidly as possible. The opinion, while non-binding, carries significant legal and political weight.
Permanent Residency: A Status Designed to Be Temporary
When Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1967, it did not offer the roughly 70,000 Palestinians then living there Israeli citizenship. Instead, it classified them as permanent residents — a legal category under the Entry into Israel Law (1952) that had been designed for immigrants, not for people who had lived on the land for generations. Palestinian Jerusalemites were, in effect, reclassified as resident aliens in their own city.
Permanent residency is not hereditary in any reliable sense. Children born to Palestinian Jerusalemite parents are entitled to residency only if their parents can demonstrate that the “centre of life” test — a bureaucratic standard requiring proof that the family genuinely lives in Jerusalem — is met. The documentation burden falls entirely on Palestinians. HaMoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual has litigated hundreds of such cases and reported that the Israeli Interior Ministry applies the centre-of-life standard more stringently to Palestinians than to any other population group.
Most critically, permanent residency can be revoked. Under a 1995 Interior Ministry policy, formalised in administrative practice if not always in statute, a Palestinian Jerusalemite who lives abroad for more than seven years, or who is deemed to have established a “centre of life” outside Israel or Jerusalem, can lose residency status. B’Tselem has documented that between 1967 and 2023, Israel revoked the residency of more than 14,000 Palestinian Jerusalemites — meaning they lost the right to live in the city where they were born. A person who leaves to study in Ramallah, to care for a sick relative in Jordan, or to pursue work that Jerusalem’s constrained economy cannot provide, risks returning to find the door closed.
Dispossession in the Built Environment: Planning, Housing, and Settler Expansion
The legal precarity of residency intersects with a physical landscape of dispossession. Palestinian Jerusalemites make up roughly 38 percent of the city’s population — a figure drawn from Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics data — but live on a fraction of its land. Bimkom — Planners for Planning Rights has documented that the Palestinian neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem have been systematically under-zoned and under-resourced: decades of Israeli municipal planning allocated minimal land for Palestinian residential construction while expanding Jewish neighbourhoods and settlements across the eastern half of the city.
The result is a housing crisis that forces families to build without permits — because permits are structurally inaccessible — and then face demolition orders for those same unpermitted structures. OCHA oPt data show that home demolitions in East Jerusalem have continued in every year of the occupation. The neighbourhood of Silwan, directly south of the Old City, has faced some of the most intense demolition pressure, compounded by settler organisations — most prominently Elad — acquiring properties and establishing settler enclaves inside a predominantly Palestinian residential area, supported by Israeli government funding and police protection.
In Sheikh Jarrah, the pattern of settler property claims backed by Israeli courts — claims rooted in pre-1948 Jewish ownership, a legal avenue not available to Palestinians dispossessed in 1948 — drew global attention in 2021 when threatened evictions contributed to a broader escalation of violence. Ir Amim and Al-Haq have both documented the asymmetric application of property law in East Jerusalem in detail.
Living Between Statuses: The Human Weight of Legal Limbo
For Palestinian Jerusalemites, the daily experience of this legal architecture is neither abstract nor distant. It appears in the queue at the Interior Ministry’s Misrad Hapnim office in Wadi al-Joz, where families spend hours — sometimes days — trying to register a newborn or renew a hawiyye (identity card). It appears in the calculation a young person makes before accepting a university place in the West Bank: will the commute cost me my right to come home? It appears in the decision some families make to crowd into a single apartment in Jerusalem rather than move to a more affordable home just kilometres away in Abu Dis, because Abu Dis is on the other side of the wall, and the wall is also the line between residency and its loss.
Palestinian legal scholar Raja Shehadeh has described the condition of Palestinians under Israeli administration as one of “being present and absent simultaneously” — legally in the city, legally disposable by the city. The Basic Law declared Jerusalem united. For the Palestinians living there, the unity has never extended to them.
Sources
- UN Security Council Resolution 252 (1968); Resolution 478 (1980) — un.org/securitycouncil
- ICJ Advisory Opinion, Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, 9 July 2004
- ICJ Advisory Opinion, Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, 19 July 2024
- Basic Law: Jerusalem, Capital of Israel (1980) — Knesset legislation
- Fourth Geneva Convention (1949), Article 49 — ICRC
- Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019)
- HaMoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual — residency revocation documentation, hamoked.org
- B’Tselem, “Revocation of Residency in East Jerusalem,” btselem.org
- Bimkom — Planners for Planning Rights, planning and zoning reports on East Jerusalem, bimkom.org
- Ir Amim, settlement and planning reports, ir-amim.org.il
- Al-Haq, property law and settler expansion documentation, alhaq.org
- OCHA oPt, demolition data, ochaopt.org
- Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, Jerusalem population data
