Wikipedia Deep Dive

Area C

12 min read

Imagine a territory where nearly half a million people from one group live under one set of laws, while 350,000 people from another group, living in the exact same territory, live under an entirely different legal system. Where one group can build homes with relative ease, and the other sees 94 percent of their building permit applications rejected. Where promises made three decades ago to gradually transfer control have simply... never happened.

This is Area C.

The Alphabet Soup of Occupation

To understand Area C, you first need to understand how the West Bank got carved up like a strange political pizza. In 1995, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed what's known as the Oslo II Accord—part of a series of agreements meant to be stepping stones toward Palestinian self-governance and, eventually, a final peace deal.

The accord divided the West Bank into three zones, each with a letter and a different degree of Palestinian self-rule.

Area A would be under full Palestinian civil and security control. These are the major Palestinian cities—Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jericho, and others. About 18 percent of the West Bank.

Area B would have Palestinian civil control but shared Israeli-Palestinian security authority. This covers most Palestinian towns and villages. About 22 percent of the West Bank.

Area C would remain under full Israeli control—but only temporarily. The agreement explicitly stated that this territory "will be gradually transferred to Palestinian jurisdiction." It was supposed to be a transitional arrangement.

Three decades later, that transfer has never occurred.

The Geography of Control

Here's what makes Area C unusual: it wasn't defined by drawing lines around specific territory. Instead, Areas A and B were defined first by drawing circles around Palestinian population centers—the cities, towns, and villages where Palestinians actually lived at the time of the agreement. Area C was simply defined as everything else. Everything outside those circles.

This means Area C is the only contiguous part of the West Bank. Areas A and B exist as islands, archipelagos of Palestinian control scattered across the landscape but not connected to each other. If you want to drive from one Palestinian city to another, you typically have to pass through Area C.

This geographic reality has profound implications. Any large-scale infrastructure project—a highway, a water pipeline, an electrical grid—necessarily involves Area C. Control over Area C means control over Palestinian economic development and freedom of movement.

Initially, Area C constituted about 72 to 74 percent of the West Bank. Under a 1998 agreement called the Wye River Memorandum, Israel committed to withdrawing from an additional 13 percent, which would have reduced Area C to around 61 percent. But Israel only actually withdrew from 2 percent. Then, in 2002, during a military operation called Operation Defensive Shield, Israeli forces reoccupied all the territory they had withdrawn from.

Today, Area C formally comprises about 61 to 63 percent of the West Bank, depending on how you count certain areas like East Jerusalem and the Palestinian portion of the Dead Sea.

Two Peoples, Two Legal Systems

As of 2023, Area C is home to approximately 491,548 Israeli settlers and 354,000 Palestinians. These two populations live under radically different legal regimes.

Israeli settlers are administered by something called the Judea and Samaria Area administration. Through a legal mechanism sometimes described as "pipelining," Israeli civil law is effectively extended to the settlements. Settlers vote in Israeli elections, are tried in Israeli civil courts, and enjoy the full protections of Israeli law.

Palestinians in Area C live under military law, administered directly by the Israeli Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, known by its acronym COGAT. They cannot vote in Israeli elections despite living under Israeli control. They are subject to military courts and military regulations.

The Palestinian Authority—the governing body for Palestinian areas—is responsible for providing medical and educational services to Palestinians in Area C. But here's the catch: all construction and infrastructure must be approved by Israel. And Israel almost never approves.

The Permit Paradox

If you're Palestinian and want to build a home in Area C, you need a permit from the Israeli Civil Administration. Getting one is nearly impossible.

Between 2000 and 2012, Palestinians submitted 3,750 applications for building permits. Israel approved 211 of them. That's a 5.6 percent approval rate. And the numbers got worse over time: from 2009 through 2012, only 37 permits were approved out of 1,640 applications—a 2.3 percent approval rate.

The restrictions go beyond houses. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, "Even basic residential and livelihood structures, such as a tent or a fence, require a building permit." The planning and zoning regime makes it virtually impossible for Palestinians to obtain permits in most of Area C.

Meanwhile, according to the same Civil Administration figures, approximately 75 percent of construction in Israeli settlements proceeds without proper permits. The rules, it seems, apply very differently to different populations.

Nearly 70 percent of Area C is entirely off-limits for Palestinian construction under any circumstances. In the remaining 30 percent, the permit process is so restrictive that approval is, in practice, nearly impossible to obtain.

Building Without Permission, Living in Fear

Faced with permit approval rates in the single digits, many Palestinians build anyway. They have families. They need homes. What choice do they have?

But building without a permit means living under the constant threat of demolition.

Between 1988 and 2014, Israel issued 14,087 demolition orders against Palestinian structures built without permits. Only about 20 percent of these orders have actually been carried out. The remaining 80 percent hang like swords of Damocles over the families who live in these structures. The orders don't expire. A home that has stood for ten years might be demolished tomorrow, or next year, or never—there's no way to know.

As the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem describes it, Palestinians in Area C "must subsist in very rudimentary living conditions. They are denied any legal avenue to build homes or develop their communities, so they face the constant fear that their homes might be demolished, and that they be expelled and lose their livelihood."

The Legal Dispute

The international community—through the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and the governments of most countries—considers Israeli settlements in occupied territory to be illegal under international law. Specifically, they cite the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring parts of its own civilian population into territory it occupies.

Article 53 of that same convention is also relevant to demolitions: "Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons... is prohibited, except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations."

Israel disputes this interpretation. Its legal position rests on several arguments.

First, Israel argues that the Fourth Geneva Convention doesn't apply because the West Bank wasn't the sovereign territory of any state when Israel captured it in 1967—Jordan had annexed it, but that annexation was never internationally recognized.

Second, Israel points to Article 43 of the Hague Conventions, which gives an occupying power authority to maintain order and civil life in occupied territory.

Third, Israel notes that under the Oslo Accords themselves, the parties agreed that planning and zoning in Area C would fall under Israeli authority until a final status agreement.

Fourth, for demolitions specifically, Israel argues that it is applying planning regulations that date back to the British Mandate period, which governed Palestine before Israeli independence. Critics counter that Israel selectively enforces these Mandatory rules—using them to justify demolitions while ignoring their provisions for granting permits.

Closed Military Zones

About 20 percent of the entire West Bank has been declared a "closed military area" by Israel—territory where access is restricted for security reasons. In 2010, 60 percent of demolitions took place in these zones.

Israel sometimes defends demolitions in these areas on safety grounds, arguing that it's dangerous for people to live in active firing zones.

Critics respond that the declaration of closed military zones is itself a legal device to deny Palestinians access to their land. They point to villages that have existed for decades, built on traditional village land, now designated as "collections of illegal structures" and subject to demolition because they were never formally "planned" under Israeli-controlled zoning systems.

The Resource Question

Area C isn't just empty desert. It's richly endowed with natural resources, including most of the agricultural and grazing land available to Palestinians in the West Bank. Control over Area C means control over water resources, quarries, and agricultural potential.

This is part of why the failure to transfer Area C to Palestinian jurisdiction matters so much. Without access to these resources, Palestinian economic development is severely constrained. The areas under Palestinian control—Areas A and B—are disconnected islands surrounded by Israeli-controlled territory. Any attempt to build the infrastructure of a functioning state runs into the wall of Area C.

The Bureaucracy of Occupation

The day-to-day administration of Area C is handled by the Israeli Civil Administration, which was established in 1981. Despite its name suggesting civilian governance, the Civil Administration has always been subordinate to the Israeli military and the Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service.

The Civil Administration is part of a larger entity: the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT. This is a unit within Israel's Defense Ministry, reflecting the fundamentally military character of the governance structure.

When the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994, it took over most civil functions in Areas A and B. But in Area C, the Civil Administration continues to operate, managing the Palestinian population and coordinating with the Palestinian government on matters that cross zonal boundaries.

A Transitional Arrangement That Never Transitioned

Perhaps the most striking thing about Area C is how something explicitly designed to be temporary has become seemingly permanent.

The Oslo Accords were not meant to be the final word on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They were interim arrangements—a framework for building trust and taking incremental steps toward a final status agreement that would resolve the big questions: borders, Jerusalem, refugees, and settlements.

The text of Oslo II is explicit: Area C "will be gradually transferred to Palestinian jurisdiction in accordance with this Agreement." The expectation was that as the peace process progressed, more and more of Area C would shift to Palestinian control, until a final agreement determined the permanent borders.

That final agreement never came. The peace process stalled, collapsed, restarted, and stalled again. And through it all, the "transitional" arrangements of the Oslo Accords remained frozen in place—except that they weren't entirely frozen. The settler population in Area C has grown dramatically since 1995, from around 150,000 to nearly half a million today.

What was designed as a temporary administrative division has, through three decades of non-transition, become a defining feature of life in the West Bank. Two populations sharing the same territory under two different legal systems. One with the power to build, develop, and expand. The other living in uncertainty, their permit applications rejected, their homes under threat, waiting for a transition that seems less likely with each passing year.

The Outposts

There's one more wrinkle worth understanding. Beyond the official settlements—which Israel considers legal even as the international community considers them violations of international law—there are also "outposts." These are settlements that even Israel acknowledges are illegal under Israeli law.

Outposts are typically established without government authorization, often by ideologically motivated settlers seeking to establish facts on the ground. They violate Israeli planning regulations and were built without the required permits from any authority.

Yet many outposts persist for years, some eventually receiving retroactive legalization from the Israeli government. The selective enforcement of building regulations becomes particularly stark when comparing the treatment of unauthorized Palestinian construction—subject to demolition orders—with unauthorized Israeli outposts that often face no consequences at all.

Looking at the Map

If you look at a map of the West Bank today, you'll see something that resembles a kind of leopard print. The Palestinian areas—A and B—appear as spots scattered across the territory, islands of Palestinian authority surrounded by the sea of Area C.

The settlements and their associated infrastructure—the bypass roads connecting settlements to each other and to Israel, the closed military zones, the nature reserves where Palestinian construction is prohibited—fragment the landscape. Critics describe this as creating a "matrix of control" that makes a contiguous Palestinian state practically impossible.

Defenders of Israeli policy point to legitimate security concerns, the need to protect Israeli civilians living in the settlements, and the legal complexities of a situation where final borders have never been agreed upon.

But whatever one's views on the underlying conflict, the human reality of Area C is stark. Hundreds of thousands of people living under one set of rules. Hundreds of thousands more, on the same land, living under entirely different rules. A temporary arrangement approaching its fourth decade with no end in sight.

The alphabet soup of Areas A, B, and C—dry bureaucratic categories in a diplomatic agreement—shapes the daily lives of millions of people. Where you can build. Whether you can travel. What courts you're subject to. What rights you have. All determined by which letter of the alphabet your village falls under, and which population you belong to.