The card in your pocket determines whether you can drive to the next city, whether your spouse can sleep in your home, whether your child can visit a hospital. For Palestinians living under Israeli control, identity documents are not administrative formality. They are the architecture of daily life — and the color of your ID is the blueprint.
Israel administers three distinct identity documents for Palestinians across the occupied territories, each tied to a different legal regime, each carrying a different set of rights and restrictions. Understanding the differences is not a bureaucratic exercise. It is a window into how a system of separation is made to function quietly, document by document, checkpoint by checkpoint.
The Green Card: Life Under Military Administration in the West Bank
Palestinians registered as residents of the West Bank carry a green identity card, issued under the Israeli military’s Civil Administration — the bureaucratic arm of the occupation established in 1981. The Civil Administration maintains the Palestinian population registry for the West Bank, meaning Israel controls who is officially “from” the West Bank, who can be added to a family record, and who risks losing their registered address.
Green ID holders are subject to a permit system that governs nearly every form of movement. Travel to Jerusalem, to Israel, or to Gaza requires a permit from Israeli military authorities. These permits are not automatic. They are issued selectively, often denied, and always revocable. Access to Jerusalem — including Al-Aqsa Mosque, hospitals in East Jerusalem, and family members living there — requires a permit that the vast majority of West Bank Palestinians cannot obtain on demand.
The permit system is documented extensively by Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem and by HaMoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual, which has handled thousands of cases involving Palestinians denied permits, separated from family members across administrative lines, or unable to access medical care. HaMoked’s case files show routine denials for family unification requests, sometimes sustained over years or decades, with no meaningful right of appeal.
Even movement within the West Bank is not free. A network of checkpoints, roadblocks, and settler-only roads — documented by OCHA oPt in its Access and Movement reports — fragments the territory into disconnected zones. A green ID from Nablus does not guarantee passage to Ramallah. A merchant from Hebron cannot always reach a supplier in Jenin on a given morning.
The Blue Card: Jerusalem Residency, Not Citizenship
Palestinians in East Jerusalem carry a blue identity card, the same color as Israeli identity documents — but the legal status they confer is categorically different. Following Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967, an annexation not recognized under international law, Palestinian residents were granted permanent residency, not citizenship. The distinction is consequential and, for many families, catastrophic.
Permanent residency is a status that can be revoked. Under Israeli law, Palestinian Jerusalemites can lose their residency — and with it, the right to live in their city — if they are found to have established their “center of life” elsewhere. Between 1967 and 2023, Israel revoked the residency of more than 14,000 Palestinian Jerusalemites, according to data compiled by Ir Amim, an Israeli organization that monitors Jerusalem policy. Residency can be lost by studying abroad, by living in a West Bank neighborhood that falls on the wrong side of a bureaucratic line, or simply by failing to prove continuous presence to the satisfaction of Israeli authorities.
Blue ID holders can move more freely within Israel and Jerusalem than green ID holders. They pay Israeli taxes. They can access Israeli social services, though access to National Insurance benefits has been a subject of ongoing legal dispute. But they cannot vote in national Israeli elections. They hold Jordanian travel documents — not Israeli passports — making international travel administratively complicated. And they live under the constant pressure of a residency that is conditional on demonstrating that Jerusalem is, and remains, the center of their life.
HaMoked has documented dozens of cases in which blue ID holders married to green ID holders were effectively forced to choose between their city and their family. Because green ID spouses cannot obtain residency in Jerusalem through normal family unification channels — Israel froze Palestinian family unification applications in 2003 under the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law, a temporary order renewed annually by the Knesset — couples routinely live in legal limbo, separated by checkpoints that are a few kilometers apart.
The Gaza ID: Enclosure as Policy
Palestinians registered as residents of Gaza have historically carried an orange identity card, though card colors and formats have shifted over time. The defining feature of Gaza registration has never been the color of the document — it has been what the document makes impossible.
Since 2007, when Israel imposed a comprehensive blockade on Gaza following Hamas’s takeover of the territory, Gaza ID holders have faced near-total restrictions on movement. Leaving Gaza requires permission through Israeli-controlled crossings or through the Rafah crossing with Egypt. Gisha — Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, an Israeli organization — has documented how Israel has used the population registry as an instrument of separation, preventing Palestinians registered in Gaza from relocating to the West Bank, and preventing West Bank Palestinians from registering a Gaza address. The registry, in Gisha’s analysis, has been used not merely to document population but to control it.
The humanitarian consequences of Gaza’s enclosure are catalogued in detail by OCHA oPt, UNRWA, and WHO. Access to specialized medical care — treatment unavailable inside Gaza — requires exit permits that Israeli authorities grant inconsistently and deny regularly. Patients with cancer, cardiac conditions, and pediatric illnesses have died waiting for permits. The Gaza ID, in this context, is not just a document. It marks the outer boundary of a permitted life.
One Registry, Three Realities
The three-card system did not emerge fully formed. It evolved through decades of administrative decisions, military orders, and laws — many challenged in Israeli courts, some struck down, most upheld or left intact. What ties the system together is a single Israeli-controlled population registry from which all three statuses flow. Palestinians have no authority over this registry. Changes to it — births, deaths, marriages, address updates — require Israeli approval. Scholar Yael Berda, in her study of the Israeli permit regime, describes the registry and the documentation system built around it as a form of governance that produces separation not through explicit prohibition alone but through the cumulative friction of paperwork, delay, and conditional status.
A green card, a blue card, an orange card. The colors are mundane. The lives they sort are not.
Sources
- HaMoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual — case documentation on family unification, permit denials, and residency revocation
- B’Tselem: Freedom of Movement — documentation of the West Bank permit system and checkpoint network
- Ir Amim — data on Jerusalem residency revocations and demographic policy
- Gisha: Legal Center for Freedom of Movement — analysis of the Gaza closure and population registry as instruments of separation
- OCHA oPt: Access and Movement Reports — documentation of movement restrictions in the West Bank and Gaza
- Yael Berda, Living Emergency: Israel’s Permit Regime in the Occupied West Bank (Stanford University Press, 2017)
- UNRWA and WHO — humanitarian data on Gaza medical access and permit denials
