In occupied territories – such as the Palestinian Territories – confiscation of private property and establishing settlements by the occupying state is prohibited under international law. Yet, in the Westbank and East Jerusalem thousands of confiscation orders on the grounds of public needs were issued by Israel during the last 44 years of occupation. Often the land is then used to found or expand Israeli settlements.

For many years, the Israeli Civil Administration has been acquiring privately owned land normally owned by Palestinians through different methods including declaring them state land.  This process started in the early 1980s and the result has been that vast areas of the West bank were confiscated using this method.
In order to do so, the Civil Administration using among other the ottoman land law of the year 1864 which provides among other things that if a land user neglects to cultivate his land for a period of ten years, then the state can expropriate the land and give it to another in order to make it productive.