هذا التقرير متاح أيضًا بـ العربية
In mid-2020, the Palestinian Authority stopped providing Israel with updates to the Palestinian population registry. The move implemented Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ decision to withdraw from agreements signed with the occupation in response to plans to annex parts of the West Bank. At the time, it appeared to be an attempt to reclaim one of the clearest expressions of civil sovereignty. What followed, however, revealed the limits of the PA’s authority over the registry.
Although the Oslo Accords transferred management of the population registry to the Palestinian Authority, the implementing arrangements left “Israel” in effective control. They gave it exclusive authority to approve substantive changes, including the registration of categories of residents, data updates, family reunification and residency, and linked the data to the system of crossings and ID numbers. The PA thus came to administer a civil registry whose data has legal and practical effect only once approved in the registry controlled by Israel.
The population registry has returned to the centre of Palestinian debate in recent months amid escalating Israeli rhetoric about annexation and displacement, and Palestinian statements on birth registration procedures and official documents. Meanwhile, the war on the Gaza Strip has caused widespread destruction affecting government institutions and civil archives.
This report traces how Israeli control over the population registry developed from an administrative tool under the Oslo arrangements into one of the most prominent instruments for controlling Palestinians’ legal existence.
It also examines how the suspension of civil coordination in 2020, and the measures that followed the genocide in the Gaza Strip, affected the registration of Palestinian newborns abroad. It considers how these policies are tied to annexation plans and fears of displacement, how the temporary Jordanian passport has returned to the centre of debate, and what this means for Palestinians’ legal existence and their right to live in and enter their homeland.
How did the civil registry become a tool of control?
In September 1967, three months after the occupation began, Israel conducted a census in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, excluding East Jerusalem. Those recorded in it were classified as “non-citizens” and “foreign residents” in Israel, despite their inclusion in the Palestinian population registry.
This classification granted them legal residency and the “right to remain” on the land, but no citizenship rights. By contrast, about 250,000 Palestinians who were absent from the occupied Palestinian territories at the time of the census, having fled during the war, were excluded and consequently denied residency rights.
In the following years, the occupation imposed additional restrictions on registering spouses born abroad and their children, registering Palestinians born abroad, and time spent outside the occupied Palestinian territories. These restrictions caused more Palestinians to lose their residency rights and be removed from the national population registry.
The national registry was the first obstacle Israel placed in the way of Palestinian existence in the occupied Palestinian territories. Then came the 1995 Oslo II Accord. Article 28 of Annex III, its protocol on civil affairs, stipulated that authority over the population registry and documents in the West Bank and Gaza Strip would pass from the Israeli Civil Administration and military government to the Palestinian side. The same article, however, imposed fundamental restrictions that nullified that authority.
It required the Palestinian Authority to notify Israel regularly of all changes to the registry, including births, deaths, changes of address and marital status. It left the occupation with authority to register those granted residency through family reunification and affirmed that Israel would retain control over crossings, entry and exit, ID numbers and documents.
Control over the registry therefore operated on two levels. Legally, the PA had the right to manage it, but its actual role was limited to coordination, processing applications and referring them to the Israeli side. In practice, Israel retained effective control through its authority over the issuance of ID numbers and control of crossings, and its decisions on key matters such as family reunification and residency.
After the Al-Aqsa Intifada began in 2000, this control enabled the occupation to freeze family reunification applications and stop issuing visitor permits, except in some “humanitarian” cases. Then, as a result of the Palestinian split in 2006, Gaza’s Interior Ministry began issuing temporary Palestinian ID cards to Palestinians without valid identity documents.
The Norwegian Refugee Council estimated that about 12,500 Palestinians in Gaza were not included in the Palestinian population registry in 2012. Some Palestinians in the West Bank, whose residence the occupation considers illegal, rely on Jordanian travel documents, which the kingdom continues to issue to Palestinians despite the 1988 disengagement. Egypt, meanwhile, stopped issuing travel documents to Palestinians after the PA was established in 1995.
The first real test of the limits of Palestinian control over the civil registry came in May 2020. The Palestinian Authority announced that it was suspending all forms of coordination with Israel, including civil coordination, and stopped sending population registry updates. Thousands of applications and updates relating to births, deaths, addresses, travel procedures and other matters accumulated.
For the first time since the PA’s establishment 27 years earlier, Israel was no longer receiving registry updates from the Palestinians. The data was a security necessity for exercising control over Palestinians and tracking their lives, but withholding it also threatened Palestinians’ freedom of movement and travel.
According to official data, more than 25,000 children born in the West Bank after 20 May 2020 were unable to travel outside Palestine because their details had not been transferred to the Israeli civil liaison office and entered into its computerised system. The occupation even prevented some families from taking their children with them when travelling because they were absent from Israeli records. Some groups of Palestinians were also unable to complete various administrative procedures that required Israeli liaison approval and registration in its records.
Some viewed the suspension of coordination as a restoration of symbols of Palestinian sovereignty and the beginning of a national act of defiance against the occupation’s monitoring and oversight of Palestinian population registry data. International organisations, including the United Nations, said through UN Special Coordinator Nickolay Mladenov that it would be difficult for any organisation to coordinate with Israel in the PA’s place. He stressed that the PA, like the occupation and the Gaza government, had obligations towards the population within the limits of its control. These included ensuring that its policies, or its withdrawal from previous responsibilities, did not harm the population or people with humanitarian needs.
The suspension did not last long. The PA sought to establish a new framework based on coordination with international bodies to guarantee Palestinians’ right to move without Israeli approval. It also tried to find alternative ways to manage the affairs of Palestinian citizens affected by Israeli restrictions. These efforts ran up against Israel’s control over the civil registry’s legal framework, ID numbers, and entry and exit.
In November 2020, the PA announced the resumption of relations and various forms of coordination with Israel, including civil coordination. Routine registry procedures resumed.
Between registration and displacement
Israeli control over the population registry affects more than the issuance of ID cards or the registration of newborns. It also shapes the size of the legally recognised Palestinian population by denying recognition as Palestinian to anyone outside the registry and manipulating the age limit for registering Palestinians born outside the occupied territories.
After civil coordination was suspended in 2020, the Palestinian Authority could no longer register births abroad through the previous mechanism. Registration became conditional on the children returning to the Palestinian territories with a parent who held a Palestinian ID and entering through crossings controlled by Israel.
More complicated travel procedures, rising costs, longer processing times, and the political and security conditions that followed the war made these requirements harder to meet. A growing number of Palestinian newborns were left outside the population registry, their legal status unresolved.
The effects were not confined to newborns. Palestinians listed in applications for residency, family reunification and changes of address within Palestine also faced these risks. From 2009, Israel refrained from updating the civil registry except for lists of births and deaths. This continued until 2021, when it granted Palestinian national numbers to 1,200 Palestinians out of a total of 50,000 applicants and approved changes of address from Gaza to the West Bank for 2,800 Palestinians.
Faced with difficulties registering children, travelling, securing residency and studying, thousands of Palestinians obtained and used temporary Jordanian passports. These documents facilitate travel, study and administrative procedures around the world without granting their holders a Jordanian national number. They became a practical solution for many Palestinians living abroad or unable to obtain Palestinian documents or update their population registry details. More recently, however, they have become a source of Palestinian and regional concern.
In September 2025, leaked material attributed to Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich indicated that he had sent internal memorandums and official correspondence to Israeli ministries and agencies outlining his vision for dealing with those he calls “Jordanian subjects” in the West Bank. His vision involves stripping hundreds of thousands of Palestinians of their legal status by treating anyone holding a yellow card, green card or even a temporary Jordanian passport as an “illegal resident,” opening the way for their forcible deportation to Jordan.
Other reports described direct contact by the occupation authorities with about 400,000 Palestinian citizens who live in the West Bank and hold Jordanian passports, demanding that they leave. Palestinian fears grew that their precarious legal status would be used to deny them residency in the West Bank. At the same time, Jordan feared an imminent threat overseen by Smotrich: the expulsion of nearly half a million holders of Jordanian documents, equivalent to roughly 4.5 per cent of Jordan’s current population. This would have major political, economic and demographic consequences and reverse the Oslo and Wadi Araba understandings governing the issuance of bridge cards, which were intended to ease Palestinians’ lives and ensure they remained on their land.
These fears were reflected on the ground. Lawyers and media outlets repeatedly documented an unannounced suspension of the issuance and renewal of temporary Jordanian passports. Jordan denied the suspension and subsequently refrained from officially confirming it, deepening anxiety among thousands of Palestinians who rely on these documents.
Control over the population registry and the debate over temporary Jordanian passports are therefore no longer separate administrative matters, but interconnected stages in a system that controls Palestinians’ legal existence and affects their right to residency, movement and entry into their homeland. As annexation plans intensify, these issues take on a demographic significance that extends beyond document management to reshaping the legally recognised Palestinian population.
A generation outside the registry
As the genocidal war in the Gaza Strip intensified and rhetoric about displacement escalated, displacement efforts repeatedly failed. Yet another form of displacement entered Palestinians’ lives: Israeli control over the population registry was producing a form of silent displacement targeting new generations born outside the homeland.
Palestinians abroad had become accustomed to obtaining birth certificates and then passports for their children from Palestinian embassies and consulates. Although these were yellow passports, with numbers beginning with two zeros, they allowed families to complete travel procedures and registration abroad. After 7 October, however, Palestinians found themselves deprived of this option. They faced a clear requirement: the newborn and one parent had to return in person to the Palestinian territories, the West Bank and Gaza, to obtain a Palestinian birth certificate and passport.
As a result of the genocide in the Gaza Strip and escalating settler attacks and annexation in the West Bank, a generation was born outside both the homeland and the registry, caught from birth between geography and law. Thousands of Palestinians who left Gaza during the war for treatment, evacuation or study had children outside Palestine. Having Palestinian parents with valid documents was no longer enough for these children to obtain a Palestinian ID number or enter the population registry, leaving their legal futures uncertain from their earliest days.
In testimonies documented by Palestinian media outlets, Palestinian families abroad expressed frustration at the complexity of the administrative procedures. Bringing a child into Gaza to obtain a national number and enter the civil registry is an impossible requirement amid the complete closure of the crossings, the high cost of crossing and departure on the Egyptian side, and the continuing genocide. Families whose children have neither a national number nor a valid passport have been left in a bind.
Arab states also changed their procedures in line with this requirement. Jordanian authorities began requiring children to be entered into the population registry before issuing or renewing a temporary passport. Egypt withdrew earlier measures that had facilitated entry for holders of yellow Palestinian passports subject to security approval, and barred their entry altogether. Palestinian embassies, meanwhile, stopped issuing even birth certificates, limiting themselves to issuing yellow passports after considerable difficulty and long waits.
Legally, these measures place Palestinian generations abroad in a state of “de facto statelessness.” International human rights law rejects this status and obliges the authorities concerned to remedy it, rather than deprive children of legal status or basic rights because they were born outside their state or cannot return to it. This also applies to adults who have lost their documents or whose documents have expired, and whom the Israeli requirement obliges to return to the occupied territories to replace lost or damaged documents.
This requirement poses dangers for various groups targeted by Israel, including released prisoners, Palestinian activists and rights advocates abroad. It also endangers political opponents of the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian opponents of some Arab regimes, whose targeting and repression of them the PA does not hesitate to support.
Arab regimes prefer to extricate themselves quickly from any situation that could leave them responsible for Palestinians, whether through asylum, deportation, or rendering documents meaningless and depriving Palestinians of them. Israel exploits these gaps to reduce the number of Palestinians and secure a lasting demographic advantage on Palestinian land, while the PA “hedges” against a situation it finds unsuitable by sacrificing its citizens in advance. Between them, a generation grows up bound to Palestine by pain and hope, yet separated from it on paper.