DAYS before the Board of Peace’s first meeting (scheduled for today), Israel made the very unusual move of registering broad swaths of the West Bank as state property. It smartly disguised its intentions as a move to fill in ownership gaps in the occupied areas; it plans to claim the ones where the Palestinians are unable to prove their ownership. While the specifics are yet to be known, it is a settled and trite principle of international law that an occupying power is not allowed to alter the local status quo, let alone attempt to find ways and means of claiming title to the territory itself.
This is the essence of the well-known Fourth Geneva Convention relating to the occupying power. The Convention was adopted in 1949, just four years after the UN Charter, which prohibits the use of force, saw the light of day in 1945. The Charter had effectively declared that acquiring territory through the use of force is illegal. It was thus considered necessary to establish a global regime, building on the Hague Regulations of 1907, that would deny any occupying power the right to claim title of the territory it occupied.
Read together, the UN Charter of 1945 and the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 made it clear that all occupations are by definition temporary and sooner or later they have to end. During the interim, the occupying forces who are de facto running the affairs of the occupied territory were to behave in a certain fashion. That’s what the Fourth Geneva Convention explains in 159 articles. It imposes a long list of actions and measures that the occupier will not take. Failure would mean a minor or a grave breach of the Convention.
Even in 1949, the principles were so widely agreed upon that Israel felt obliged to sign the Fourth Geneva Convention on Dec 8 of the same year and then, after due reflection and deliberation within the country, stretching over almost two years, it was ratified on July 6, 1951. This was in the backdrop of UNGA Resolution 181, which in 1947 had already proposed the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state, an Arab state and an international Jerusalem.
The BoP’s writ will be tested by Israel’s move to register parts of the West Bank as state land.
During its long occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, both referred to as ‘occupied territories’ in the world press for the last several decades, Israel has regrettably been violating several of the 159 articles of the Convention that it had ratified after almost two years of internal deliberations. Now the latest violation is the gradual registering of these lands as Israel state lands. What does all this mean for the Board of Peace?
The political domestic controversy with regard to the BoP is an issue for political parties to resolve but from a legal standpoint it is to be taken as a regional arrangement that member states can enter into under Chapter VIII of the UN Charter. UNSC Resolution 2803, which was passed a few months ago, positions itself as leading to a sort of “pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood”. Para 16 of the plan annexed to the UNSC Resolution declares that “Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza”. It also approves the raising of an International Security Force; once created, the right to use force of any kind and of any nature — to the extent of Gaza — by Hamas and the Israeli Defence Forces ought to cease.
However, it is to be borne in mind that Palestinians have a right to resist the occupation. That right is not negotiable and neither should the recent UNSC Resolution 2803 be read as curtailing this right. This right is given to every population — irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity — that is living under unlawful occupation. The more brutal the tactics of the occupying power the fiercer the tactics of resistance. The greater the repression of the local population in venues such as the West Bank, the greater the justification to seek assistance from third countries. That’s how Iran developed a legal basis to fund Hamas to support a population that is exercising its right of recognised resistance under international law and also arguably fulfilling Iran’s own obligation to make efforts to prevent genocide. Article 1 of the Genocide Convention of 1948 states that parties to the Convention “undertake to prevent” genocide. This obligation is not only for Iran but for all states that have acceded to the Genocide Convention, and which include almost all the members of the present BoP and other countries including the OIC member states.
The gradual transfer of West Bank land by the Israeli state to itself threatens the derailment of the BoP — alternatively, the board can establish its writ by asserting itself and prevailing over Israel to stop the illegal transfers and resort to status quo ante. Although the BoP was created by UNSC 2803 for Gaza’s reconstruction and its eventual handing over to the Palestinian Authority, it still has the political leverage to persuade Israel that it has to respect the Fourth Geneva Convention in the West Bank if the Gaza plan is to move forward.
We are aware that the International Court of Justice is on record as asserting that Israel’s policies in the West Bank — including settlement expansion and land appropriation — are incompatible with international law. No state recognises Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank. Even Israel’s closest allies, including the US and members of the European Union, have consistently treated the territory as occupied. Israel itself suspended Palestinian land registration in 1967, creating the legal vacuum it now exploits. Domestic claims cannot override international law; they remain unilateral assertions without recognition or legitimacy.
How BoP members handle this move in the West Bank by Israel will set the tone for the credibility of the sequential plan laid out in UNSC 2803.
The writer is a former caretaker federal law minister.
Published in Dawn, February 19th, 2026
