The spouses of Palestinian Authority residents are imprisoned in their homes
They fell in love, got married and now want to stay in the West Bank legally ● The immigrant couple face the systems in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which dissolve their requests and turn them into prisoners where they wanted to live ● If in the past Israel introduced a regulated quota system, today There is almost no chance of gaining residency ● This is how living in the shadows without any documentation
On a sunny day at the end of June, Sna Qassem and Roba Salameh set out from Ramallah towards the Jordan River in anticipation of seeing their families for the first time in years. Their parents, brothers and sisters waited on the other side, in Jordanian territory. The two groups, with a transparent border separating them, shouted and waved at each other. Salameh, emotionally overwhelmed, burst into tears.
The two women, Jordanian citizens of Palestinian descent, are staying in the West Bank illegally. They both married Palestinian men living in the West Bank many years ago. Their husbands and children carry Palestinian identity cards, but Israel’s current policy prevents them, and almost any other candidate, from immigrating to the West Bank legally.
Since their presence in the West Bank is illegal, Salameh and Qassem live on very limited borders. They cannot open a bank account in Palestine or work in Palestinian cities legally. If they leave for a family visit to Jordan, they may not be able to return to the West Bank, even though their spouses and children live there.
Qassem says the family reunion on the Jordan River was the first time in more than twenty years that she saw her relatives she left in Jordan. When she saw them, she says, her stomach turned. “How did I feel? I wanted to jump into the river and swim to them,” says Qassem.
Salameh, Qassem and thousands more like them live in the Palestinian Authority, which holds limited self-government in isolated enclaves across the West Bank. In order to live in these areas legally, as in the rest of the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians must hold a green identity card, decorated with the
Palestinian Authority’s winged eagle emblem.
In practice, however, the Palestinian Authority cannot issue identity cards without a permit from Israel. Nor can it determine who is allowed to enter its territory or live there legally. In order to obtain a Palestinian identity card, the Palestinians apply to Ramallah, and it sends the same applications to Israel for approval.
In most cases, such as birth and death records, the process goes smoothly. But citizens of foreign countries who marry Palestinians have been a sensitive issue for a long time. Israel claims that granting residency status to those people — a process known as family reunification — is not a right but a privilege granted only under exceptional conditions.
In 1987, the High Court unanimously ruled that international law did not guarantee citizens of foreign countries marrying Palestinians the right to residency in the West Bank.
Tens of thousands of people are apparently living in the West Bank illegally, cut off from their families living in other countries, and the danger of deportation is constantly hovering over their heads.
As a result, tens of thousands of people are apparently living in the West Bank illegally, cut off from their families living in other countries, and the danger of deportation is constantly hovering over their heads.
In the absence of official documents, the spouses of Palestinian Authority citizens fear any travel in the West Bank that is not under PA control, where they risk crossing IDF checkpoints, arresting or deporting them.
Alaa Motier, a Palestinian Jordanian, has lived in the Qalandiya refugee camp near Ramallah since 2011. She said she had never traveled as far north as Hebron, about an hour’s drive from her home, for fear of deportation. She has also never returned home to visit her family in Jordan in the decade since she left.
“Every time they celebrate a happy occasion, a birthday or a wedding, I can’t bring myself to log on to Facebook to watch it. I feel like my heart is burning,” Motier says.
Lack of official status sometimes exposes immigrants to more cases of exploitation and abuse. Qassem claims she suffered years of violence from her ex-husband. “He would hit me, insult me, hurt me. He took advantage of the situation,” she said.
Qassem considered returning to Jordan, but could not bear the thought that she might never be able to live with her children again. She stayed with her husband for decades. “If I could open my own bank account, for example, I would not have had to stay that long,” says Qassem, who finally left her husband earlier this year.
During the 1990s, the Israeli government allocated a certain annual quota of family reunification permits, which peaked at about 4,000 permits. However, following the second intifada in 2000, Israel severed ties with the Palestinian Authority and froze family reunification permits.
In 2007, the Israeli government announced that it would consider some 50,000 special requests from Palestinians as a gesture of goodwill, following a series of petitions filed by the human rights organization HaMoked. According to court documents, about 32,000 applications were approved, but the government has not returned to the quota system since.
On Sunday, August 29, Defense Minister Bnei Gantz met with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas for the first time since 2010. During the meeting, Israel said it would authorize the PA to regulate status for only about 5,000 Palestinians who do not hold a Palestinian identity card.
Another generation of Palestinians has visited abroad, met spouses, married and returned to the West Bank. No organization claims to know the exact number of citizens of foreign countries living illegally in the West Bank.
Meanwhile, another generation of Palestinians has visited abroad, met a couple, married and returned to the West Bank. No organization claims to know the exact number of foreign nationals living illegally in the West Bank after marrying Palestinians. But human rights organizations and a Palestinian One estimated that it was tens of thousands.
According to a source who retired from the Ministry of Civil Affairs in the Palestinian Authority, as of 2020, the ministry has accumulated more than 35,000 applications for the unification of Palestinian families. Between 2010 and 2018, only five requests were approved, the Ministry of Defense told HaMoked following a request for freedom of information.
“These are not even people who want to live in Israel. These are people who are trying to live with their spouses in Hebron, Nablus, Ramallah,” says Yotam Ben Hillel, an Israeli lawyer representing spouses of Palestinians seeking residency in the West Bank.
Israel’s policy states that only exceptional humanitarian cases will be approved, but the criteria for defining such cases are not accessible to the public. Petitions to the High Court demanding that they be disclosed were rejected for security reasons.
“We always ask Israel what the security rationale is for this. I believe it is a political decision and not a security issue,” Palestinian Minister of Civil Affairs Hussein al-Sheikh — one of the PA’s close advisers to Mahmoud Abbas — told frustrated Palestinians in February in one of the many demonstrations. On a subject that takes place in front of his office.
Al-Sheikh assured protesters that officials in Ramallah regularly raised the issue in talks with their Israeli counterparts.
“One million Palestinians from the back door”
However, there are those who accuse the Palestinian Authority of contributing to this bottleneck by refusing to forward the requests received by the Palestinian Civil Affairs Committee to the Israeli authorities. In its response to HaMoked, the Ministry of Defense claimed that during the said period it received only 18 requests from the Palestinian Authority.
A spokesman for the Ramallah Civil Affairs Committee did not respond to repeated phone calls from us for several months. The Coordinator of Government Operations in the Occupied Territories, the military body that handles the affairs of Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, declined to answer some of the detailed questions we sent to him on the subject.
“Every request sent to us by the Palestinian Authority is reviewed and considered in accordance with procedures,” the operations coordination unit said succinctly. Col. (Res.) Grisha Jakubowicz, who has held senior positions in the Coordination Unit for Operations in the Occupied Territories, agrees that at the private level “the issue has [humanitarian] and security aspects.”
In general, however, he said, the issue could not be separated from large and unresolved issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, such as the right of return to Israeli territory that the Palestinians demand for the descendants of refugees who fled or were deported during the 1948 War of Independence.
The vast majority of those spouses who married Palestinians living in the West Bank are themselves descendants of Palestinian families, who were born and raised in exile, especially in Arab countries, says Jakubowicz. Most of them came to the West Bank through visa visas that were valid for a few months, and just stayed.
Former senior GSS commander. “Our finger is light on the trigger [rejecting requests]. Anything small enough to reject an application, unless there is some petition to the High Court.
Such visas are not easy to obtain, and are subject to strict security checks by Israel, says Arik Barbing, a former senior GSS commander. “Our finger is light on the trigger [rejecting requests]. “Everything is small enough to reject an application, unless there is some petition to the High Court,” says Barbing, adding: “We are not obligated to allow them to enter the area.”
Although those entering the West Bank are not trying to obtain Israeli citizenship or residency, Jakubowicz believes that they affect the overall demographic balance, which will play an important role in determining the permanent lines of order.
“The issue is directly related to the right of return. Imagine a million Palestinians marrying a million foreign nationals. That’s how you put a million Palestinians out the back door,” says Jakubowicz, who now works as an independent expert on Israeli-Palestinian relations.
“At such a stage, there will be no more point in discussing the right of return, because anyone who wants to come here will be able to get status,” he adds. However, the restrictions also apply to those who have no real national connection to the conflict.
A recent petition to the High Court dealt with a German woman’s request to live with her husband in Hebron. Other applicants for residence — such as Nora al-Hajaji, originally from Tunisia — are Arabs but not Palestinians. We have built a whole life here, “said al-Hajaji, who knew her husband online before coming to the West Bank in 2008.
Blue certificate, green certificate
In recent years, since the quota system was frozen, Palestinians seeking West Bank residency status for their spouses have found themselves trapped between the Israeli and Palestinian bureaucracy, and are unsure where to turn.
When Palestinians apply for a residency permit — whether for new babies or for the wife or new husband — for residence in the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank, their first stop is the Palestinian Authority.
In the absence of a peace agreement with the Palestinians, the West Bank has been under Israeli control since 1967. During the 1990s, Israel signed a series of bilateral agreements with the PLO, known as the Oslo Accords.
The agreements led to the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, which gained limited control over enclaves scattered throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In the optimistic days of Oslo, Israel and the new Palestinian Authority created a new system for issuing identity cards to Palestinians.
However, the bilateral agreements, which were originally intended to be only interim agreements, left the decision on who could enter and live in the West Bank legally in the hands of Israel.
Barbing, a former GSS commander, says Ramallah has an interest in allowing Israel to closely monitor who enters Palestinian territory, whether for a visit or for residence, and to prevent the entry of terrorist operatives or potential opponents. “There are common interests here between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. “, He says in a phone interview.
In order to obtain a green residency certificate for their spouses, Palestinians must apply to the offices of the Palestinian Authority for Civil Affairs. In principle, ministry officials examine the requests before making proper requests to the coordinator of government operations in the territories, who consults with other Israeli government bodies before making his decision.
However, the additional layer of bureaucracy created by the Oslo Accords has added a new difficulty: it seems that the Palestinian Authority is no longer even forwarding requests for family unification to the Israeli side, in protest of its policies.
According to the coordinator of operations in the territories, as far as he can determine, only a small handful of Palestinian requests reached its doorstep in 2010. The Palestinian Authority claims that Israel refuses to recognize the requests it sends it. However, human rights organizations say that Ramallah also did not provide them with proof that the requests were indeed transferred to the Israeli side.
A number of Palestinians who have spoken to Israel over time have reported that the Palestinian Authority’s Civil Affairs Committee no longer even allows them to submit new applications for family reunification.
“We are going to the Palestinian Authority, we are being told to go and talk to Israel. We are going to Israel, we are being told to talk to the Palestinian Authority,” said Muhammad Raji, a Jordanian-Palestinian from the village of Beit Sira near Ramallah. Raji, who is married to a Palestinian from the West Bank, has been seeking resident status since 2008. “Everyone says it’s someone else’s problem,” he says.
Lawyers and human rights activists remain confused in the face of the situation. An employee of a human rights organization, who asked to remain anonymous so he could speak freely on the sensitive issue, claims that Israel is “one hundred percent guilty” of the stalemate, but says the PA’s puzzling refusal to pass the petitions hurts legal efforts to fight that policy.
“The only way to challenge this stalemate in Israeli courts is to file private cases, and here the Palestinian Ministry of Civil Affairs is a big obstacle: Israel only receives requests from the Palestinian Authority; it is not possible to file a request directly,” he says.
“The Ministry of Civil Affairs does not forward applications to Israel or give official confirmation that the application has been transferred. Then the Israeli army can simply say that it has never received the application. So we are at a dead end.”
“For some reason, the Ministry of Civil Affairs does not forward requests to Israel or give official confirmation that the request has been forwarded. Then the Israeli army can simply say that it has never received the request. So we are at a dead end,” he adds.
Various members of the Palestinian Civil Affairs Committee refused or refrained from responding to our inquiries for several months. Jakubowicz attributes this to the Palestinian Authority’s “all or nothing” approach to the issue.
“The Palestinian Authority does not know how to act here, because they are helping these people get here, they are signing their permits, but they cannot solve their problems for them. On the other hand, there is a back door here that the Palestinians have been using as a loophole for many years,” he said. Jakubowicz, regarding the visas.
Unknown fate
The frustration of some of the families in the face of the current situation has led in recent months to regular protests in front of the headquarters of the Civil Affairs Committee in Ramallah. Ongoing demonstrations — albeit small — in front of Palestinian Authority offices are rare in the West Bank, where opposition to the regime is usually met with arrest or even violence.
In the past, those who made their voices heard were mostly spouses with Western passports, who apparently provide some protection against abuse. However, the current demonstrations are different — most of them are led by women from the Arab world, and especially from Jordan.
It’s worse than being a prisoner, “Motier says.” Prisoners at least know when they are expected to be released from prison. But we are subject to an unknown fate “
On Sunday in early August, about 150 Palestinians concerned with the issue gathered in front of the committee’s headquarters, located several hundred meters from the Israeli Civil Administration near Beit El, and issued slogans calling on Minister of Civil Affairs al-Sheikh to grant them the requested permits.
The demonstrators, including Motiir, a Jordanian-born Qalandiya resident, marched several hundred meters toward the local Israeli Ministry of Coordination and Liaison, a concrete structure located at the northern entrance to Ramallah.
It’s just a few minutes’ walk away — but as far as their requests are concerned, they were willing to walk to the other side of the world as well. “It’s worse than being a prisoner,” Motier says. “Prisoners at least know when they are expected to be released from prison. But we are subject to an unknown fate.”
