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BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights submitted a detailed data and analysis to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food in response to his recent call for submissions on the interlinkages between land rights and food security.
BADIL’s submission underscores how the Israeli regime’s legal, military, and administrative policies systematically dispossess Palestinians of land, fragment communities, and obstruct self-sufficient food systems across historic Palestine. These policies—including land confiscation, colony expansion, military zoning, restrictive planning laws, and maritime and buffer-zone controls—have destroyed agricultural, pastoral, and fishing livelihoods, undermining Palestinian food sovereignty and enforcing dependency on foreign assistance and humanitarian aid frameworks.
The submission highlights that Israeli control over land is not incidental but central to eliminating Palestinian self-sustenance. From the 1948 Nakba and subsequent expropriation laws, to the ongoing occupation of the West Bank, Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights, Palestinian communities face forced displacement, and systemic restrictions that prevent cultivation, herding, and fishing and result in a concentrated ownership of the land in the hands of the Israeli regime. In the Gaza Strip, the Israeli regime has moved beyond land confiscation to systematic destruction, rendering over 95% of agricultural land unusable, thereby violating the right to food but also Palestinian right to self-determination, which entails exercising control over land and natural resources and requires that Palestinians be able to meet their basic needs and sustain their communities.
BADIL also documents the impact of so-called “state development” projects and “ecological” measures, including the Jewish National Fund forests, nature reserves, and industrial and tourism zones, which entrench exclusion and prevent Palestinian communities from reclaiming their lands. Colonizer attacks and restrictions further undermine agricultural productivity, eroding the fellaheen economy and accelerating land abandonment.
These measures are all part of the broader Decisive Plan, which aims at imposing Israeli “sovereignty” in the occupied Palestinian territory to ultimately advance its long-standing objective of maximum land with minimum Palestinians. In addition to documenting Israeli violations, the submission highlights Palestinian strategies to protect land and food systems. These include community-based agro-ecological practices, seed saving, legal advocacy, counter-mapping and digital documentation, international solidarity campaigns, and rights-based approaches emphasizing restitution, return, and the restoration of Palestinian ecosystems as central elements to food security.
BADIL’s submission stresses that addressing land dispossession and food insecurity requires recognition of the failure of the two-state framework, which entrenches fragmentation and Israeli colonial control, and calls for comprehensive reparations and restitution as prerequisites to restoring Palestinian food sovereignty. Further, protecting the right to food in Palestine requires dismantling colonial structures, restoring access to land and resources, and supporting Palestinian resistance through legal, agro-ecological, digital, and solidarity-based strategies.