The Jerusalem District Court has frozen a government plan to reactivate the registration of land in the West Bank.
The court issued the temporary order on Tuesday, instructing the Justice Ministry, Defence Ministry and other state bodies to respond to the petitions against the tender by next Thursday.
The case was brought by Israeli rights groups Yesh Din, Bimkom and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), which are challenging the government's decision to revive the Settlement of Land Title (SOLT) process in the West Bank, which has been suspended since Israel captured the territory in the 1968 Six Day War.
Welcoming the court's decision, the organisations said: “The renewal of the land registration process in the West Bank constitutes a clear act of annexation, and the tender for administering it was carried out without authority and unlawfully.
“The tender, and the process as a whole, must be voided, since its implementation and execution will lead to widespread harm to the human rights of Palestinians and a flagrant violation of international law.”
The SOLT process is designed to establish definitive ownership of land by recording it in the official land registry. Around two-thirds of West Bank land has never been formally registered.
Jordan completed registration of roughly 34 per cent of the territory before Israel captured the West Bank in 1967, after which Israel suspended the process.
Israel's Security Cabinet decided in 2025 to revive the process, and the government subsequently moved to put the decision into practice.
In May this year, the Justice Ministry issued a tender seeking a private body to manage land-registration proceedings in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The tender was subsequently awarded before the latest court order halted its progress.
The government has presented land registration as a means of establishing and clarifying ownership.
But the petitioners argue that Israel is an occupying power and, as such, has no authority to carry out a process that permanently determines land ownership in the territory, and that it cannot lawfully delegate those powers to a private contractor, which they suggested would amount to a “de facto annexation”.
The latest court order does not cancel the government's land-registration policy, but it prevents the tender from moving forward while the legal challenge is considered.
The petitioners are seeking to have the tender, and the wider land-registration process, cancelled altogether. The state is due to respond to their arguments next Thursday.
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