Six per cent to seventy-eight, and four per cent back
Every other figure on this page follows from this one. In 1946 Jewish landholding in Mandatory Palestine was about six per cent of the territory. Today the area under full Palestinian civil and security control is about four per cent.
Mandatory Palestine, by who controls it
Every bar is the same territory — about 26,320 square kilometres — at five dates. Red: Israeli or Jewish control. Green: Palestinian. Grey and violet: Jordanian and Egyptian administration, 1949–1967.
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The same territory, on the ground
Drag the slider, or press play, to step through the four dates the geometry can carry. The 1947 partition plan and the Oslo Areas A, B and C are deliberately not drawn: no sourced polygon for either is held here, and their shares are in the chart above and the table below. The base map is Natural Earth, a cartographic base and not an adjudication of any boundary.
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The West Bank under Oslo II, thirty-one years on
A five-year interim arrangement signed in September 1995. Area C, under full Israeli control, holds every settlement, the Jordan Valley and the aquifers.
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Areas A, B and C
| Area A — 18% of the West Bank Palestinian Authority civil and security control About 18 per cent of the West Bank, containing the major Palestinian cities. The Israeli army enters it at will. |
| Area B — 22% of the West Bank Palestinian civil control, Israeli security control About 22 per cent, containing most Palestinian villages. No building permits are issued by the Palestinian Authority for state land. |
| Area C — 60% of the West Bank Full Israeli civil and security control About 60 per cent of the West Bank, containing all the settlements, the Jordan Valley, the water aquifers and almost all the agricultural land and open space. Palestinian building permits in Area C are refused in the large majority of applications. |
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- The percentages are of Mandatory Palestine as a whole — about 26,320 square kilometres — so that the five rows are comparable. The West Bank is about 21 per cent of that total and Gaza about 1 per cent.
- Area A, the only territory under full Palestinian control, is about 18 per cent of the West Bank, which is about 3.8 per cent of Mandatory Palestine. It is not contiguous: it is 165 separate enclaves.
- The International Court of Justice held on 19 July 2024 that Israel's continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful and must end as rapidly as possible, and that the settlement policy, the annexation of territory and the associated regime violate Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the prohibition on the acquisition of territory by force.
The Nakba, quantified
The Nakba, 1948: the quantitative record
Log scale.
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The figures in full
| Palestinians expelled or forced to flee over half the Arab population | 750,000 |
| Palestinian villages destroyed | 530 |
| Towns and cities depopulated | 11 |
| Documented massacres | 30+ |
| Percentage of historic Palestine seized | 78% |
| Registered refugee descendants today UNRWA registered | 6,000,000+ |
| Years the right of return has been blocked UNGA 194 (1948) — 2026 | 78 |
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The villages, one by one
The aggregate above is the sum of a list. Abu Sitta’s Atlas of Palestine 1917–1966 records every town and village emptied of its Arab population, with the date, the population it held, the land it held, the Israeli operation it fell to, whether a massacre is recorded there, and what stands on the site now. Four hundred and fifty-six of those rows are drawn here, four hundred and thirty-eight of them on the map.
Every village emptied, in the month it was emptied
Drag the slider, or press play, to move through the seventeen months in which the atlas records a depopulation, from December 1947 to June 1950. Dots accumulate: what is on screen is everything emptied up to that month, and the white rings are the places emptied in the month itself. Size is the 1948 population. Hover any dot for the village’s own record. The sand outline is Mandatory Palestine; the faint lines inside it are the modern boundaries, drawn only to orient a reader who knows the present map.
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The pace of it: villages emptied each month
Red bars are months in which the atlas records a massacre at one or more of the villages emptied. Two thirds of the whole list falls in April, May and July 1948. A month with no bar is a month in which the atlas records no depopulation.
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Which sub-districts were emptied
The fourteen Mandate sub-districts, by the number of towns and villages depopulated in each. The label gives the villages and the people.
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What stands on the sites now
The atlas records the state of each site at the time of survey. “Rubble” and “no trace” together account for nearly half of the list. The violet bars are sites where Jewish families were recorded living among or on the remains.
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- The list is the atlas’s own and is not exhaustive of the Nakba: it counts towns and villages, so the Bedouin encampments of the Naqab and the emptied urban quarters are not separate rows. Other scholarly counts — Khalidi’s All That Remains, Zochrot’s register — run higher, to around 530.
- A village is counted as a massacre site only where the atlas uses that word against it, forty-nine of the four hundred and fifty-six. A further twenty-three are recorded as the site of an atrocity, which is the atlas’s own separate term. The absence of a record is not evidence that nothing happened.
- Eighteen villages carry no coordinates in the transcription and so appear in the charts but not on the map. The population and land figures are those of 1948, before depopulation, and the totals the rows reproduce — 804,514 people and 17,124,301 dunams — are within four thousandths of one per cent of the table’s own stated totals.
The legal machinery of transfer
The expulsions removed the population. A separate body of peacetime legislation, enacted by a parliament and upheld by courts, converted the vacancy into permanent title. The Absentees’ Property Law is in force in 2026.
The legal machinery of transfer: how expulsion became title
Log scale. Dunams.
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The four statutes
| Emergency Regulations on Property of Absentees 2 December 1948 Promulgated while the expulsions were still in progress. Vests the property of anyone classed 'absent' in a state Custodian. |
| Absentees' Property Law, 5710-1950 14 March 1950 Converts the emergency regulations into permanent statute. Retroactive to 29 November 1947, before the war. Defines 'absentee' by mere physical presence in Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Trans-Jordan, Iraq, Yemen or non-Israeli-held Palestine. Still in force in 2026: the 1948 state of emergency has never been lifted. |
| Development Authority (Transfer of Property) Law, 5710-1950 9 August 1950 Supplies the disposal power the Custodian lacked. Onward sale restricted to the State, the Jewish National Fund, an institution for the settlement of landless Arabs, or a local authority, with a JNF right of first refusal. The UNCCP called the two statutes 'the two shutters of a legal diptych'. |
| Land Acquisition (Validation of Acts and Compensation) Law, 5713-1953 10 March 1953 Confers clean title retroactively, validating takings that were unlawful when carried out, on a written certificate of the Minister of Finance that no court may review (rulings of 1954 and 1981). No hearing before confiscation, no notification after. Reaches the property of Israeli citizens. |
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Jewish National Fund holdings: fifty years of purchase, two years of statute
Cumulative. The 1941 baseline was acquired on the open market over five decades; the 1949 and 1950 tranches were refugee land conveyed by the Development Authority.
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How it worked
The definition of 'absentee' turns on presence, not intention. A landowner who spent a week in a neighbouring village while his own was attacked satisfies it.
The breadth of the definition produced 'present absentees' (nifkadim nokhahim): Palestinians displaced inside the territory that became Israel, who never left the country, returned within weeks and became Israeli citizens, but whose homes remain vested in the Custodian on the legal fiction that they are absent from them. Israel has never established a registration system for them.
In Jabareen v. State of Israel (CA 4067/07), descendants of the destroyed village of al-Lajun challenged the expropriation of land taken from roughly 34,000 dunams by notice of Finance Minister Levi Eshkol on 15 November 1953, on the statutory ground that it was needed for 'settlement needs'. No settlement was built; a forest was planted on it. The claim failed.
The UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine valued the property as a quantifiable debt. Its land specialist John Berncastle produced working paper A/AC.25/W/63 on 1 May 1951, and the Commission held that the value of the abandoned Arab property 'constituted a debt by the Government of Israel to the refugees'. No compensation settlement has been concluded in the 75 years since.
After 1967 the statute was applied to East Jerusalem property owned by West Bank residents: people who had not moved, but whose property Israel's own unilateral boundary change had brought inside Jerusalem. A ministerial committee attended by two ministers 'clarified' the Custodian's full Article 19 powers over it in June 2004.
The Israeli Supreme Court, 15 April 2015
Custodian of Absentees' Property et al. v. Daqaq Nuha et al., CA 2250/06 (heard with HCJ 5931/06) · Seven justices, President Asher Grunis presiding
The Absentees' Property Law does apply to East Jerusalem property owned by West Bank Palestinians. Prospectively confined to the 'rarest of rare cases', requiring the personal authorisation of the Attorney General together with a decision of the government or a ministerial committee. Expropriations already carried out were in substance validated.
President Grunis observed that Israeli settlers resident in the West Bank fall within the literal definition of 'absentee' in respect of property they own inside Israel, that the law has never once been applied to them, and called the asymmetry "absurd".
The Court's decision has validated one of Israel's most racist and arbitrary laws, and has given the green light for the application of arbitrary codes on occupied land and its population.
— Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel
The enterprise, in numbers
The current coalition has approved more settlements than the entire thirty years of the Oslo process.
Settlements approved: Oslo era vs current coalition
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Settler population
The settlement enterprise in detail
Log scale — the categories differ by orders of magnitude.
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