Al-Mughayyir, occupied West Bank – As the October olive harvest approaches, Bilal Abu Alia stands near his home, gazing at his family’s land – territory he says Israeli authorities have taken from his family in the Palestinian village of al-Mughayyir, northeast of Ramallah. Of their original 0.4sq km (100 acres) of land, Bilal explains that his family can now only access a small area that includes their home and a few olive trees. Land confiscation in the occupied West Bank doesn’t always begin with a direct seizure.
In many instances, the process starts with the redesignation and demarcation of land on official Israeli maps, with the Israeli Civil Administration’s “Blue Line Team” playing an important role. According to a report published in mid-September by the National Bureau for Defending Land and Resisting Settlements, a body affiliated with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the Blue Line team was officially established in 1999. Its primary role is to identify and formally designate areas that Israeli authorities classify as “state land”.
Comprising surveyors, cartographers and legal experts, the team uses modern surveying technology and geographic information systems to review and redraw those boundaries on official maps, according to the bureau. The significance of the process is that land included within the boundaries Israel recognises as “state land” can subsequently be allocated for settlement projects, which are illegal under international law. Israel’s Civil Administration has argued that Blue Line revisions are technical corrections of historic surveying errors.
But the United Nations has said that the revisions have essentially expanded the boundaries of land classified by Israel as state property. The bureau report argues that, in recent years, the Blue Line team has evolved from a technical mechanism for boundary demarcation into a tool increasingly used to accelerate settlement expansion and legitimise settlement outposts. The team recently re-demarcated areas in the northern and central West Bank totalling almost 0.2sq km (49 acres) that were reclassified from “state land” to land designated for settlement activity, according to the office.
That included land that belonged to the Palestinian villages of Jalud, Qaryut, Turmusayya and al-Mughayyir. Al Jazeera has reached out to Israeli authorities for comment, but has yet to receive a response. In August 2025, an Israeli settler was shot while encroaching on Palestinian land in al-Mughayyir.
Israeli forces subsequently launched a four-day operation in the village, during which bulldozers uprooted thousands of olive trees across much of the village, including the land later taken from Bilal’s family. We watched as the olive trees planted by my great-grandfather a century ago were bulldozed and uprooted right before our eyes, yet we were powerless to stop it,” Bilal told Al Jazeera. Israel informed the family that the land had become a closed military zone, off-limits to both Palestinians and settlers.
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