The Hanover Institute for Public Policy
Data Reportby The Hanover InstituteAugust 14, 2026

Is Israel’s Occupation of Palestinian Territories Related to Its Opposition to Statehood? Reading the Recorded Votes, the Treaty Text and Each Party’s Own Statements

Israel’s parliament voted 68 to 9 against Palestinian statehood in July 2024. What the recorded votes and the law of occupation each hold.

Palestinian StatehoodOccupation LawRecorded VotesKnessetSelf-Determination
Is Israel’s Occupation of Palestinian Territories Related to Its Opposition to Statehood? Reading the Recorded Votes, the Treaty Text and Each Party’s Own Statements

On 18 July 2024 the Knesset adopted a resolution opposing the establishment of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River by a recorded vote of 68 to 9, and the territory that resolution concerns is the territory Israel has administered under military occupation since 1967. Four days later a second resolution, against unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state, passed 68 to 9. The two questions therefore meet in a single register that Israel itself publishes, while a separate register, the treaty law of belligerent occupation, sets duties over territory and population without addressing who becomes sovereign afterward. The International Court of Justice delivered an advisory opinion on 19 July 2024, the day after the first vote, holding that Israel’s settlement and annexation measures impede Palestinian self-determination; the General Assembly endorsed that opinion on 18 September 2024 by 124 votes to 14, with 43 abstentions.

Key Findings

  • The Knesset opposed the establishment of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River by 68 votes to 9 on 18 July 2024, with 77 of the 120 members recording a position and 43 not voting (Knesset plenum records, 2024).
  • Article 42 of the 1907 Hague Regulations defines occupation as territory “actually placed under the authority of the hostile army,” and Article 43 sets the occupier’s duty to restore and ensure public order and safety; neither that instrument nor the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 contains a provision creating, withholding or timetabling a successor state.
  • On 10 May 2024 the General Assembly adopted resolution ES-10/23 on Palestinian rights of membership by a recorded vote of 143 to 9, with 25 abstentions and 16 members not voting, out of 193.
  • Press-reported Israeli polling put opposition to a Palestinian state at 71% of respondents, as JNS reported the survey in its 2024 to 2025 coverage, with no sampling error published alongside it.

On 18 July 2024 the Knesset adopted a resolution opposing the establishment of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River by 68 votes to 9.

That is the clearest documented link, and it sits in Israel’s own parliamentary record. The land the resolution’s phrase covers includes the West Bank and East Jerusalem, held under Israeli military administration since June 1967.

That is one register. A second is the advisory opinion the International Court of Justice delivered on 19 July 2024, in Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem. The Court held that Israel’s settlement policy, its measures of annexation and its assertion of permanent control impede the Palestinian people’s exercise of self-determination, and that its continued presence in the territory is accordingly unlawful. The Court’s reasoning is discussed in a 2025 article in the International and Comparative Law Quarterly, published by Cambridge University Press, and the opinion itself was reproduced in International Legal Materials in 2025.

The two registers are different in kind and both are dated. One is a recorded vote of a national legislature, a count of members who took a position on a text. The other is an advisory opinion, requested by and delivered to a political organ, which by its character states the Court’s view of the law rather than issuing a judgment binding on a party. Neither register measures the other.

What the pair establishes is a documented coincidence in time and subject: within twenty-four hours in July 2024, Israel’s legislature recorded its opposition to a Palestinian state in the territory, and the Court recorded its view that measures taken in that same territory impede self-determination there. The rest of this report separates what each tier of the record holds: the votes and their arithmetic, the security grounds Israel states, the treaty law of occupation, the diplomatic record of recognition, and the points on which legal scholars disagree.

Is it often said the two reinforce each other?

It is often said that the occupation and the opposition to statehood reinforce each other, and four dated instruments carry that framing in the terms in which it circulates. None of them is a binding judgment.

General Assembly resolution A/RES/58/292, adopted in 2004, affirms that the status of the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, remains one of military occupation, and affirms the Palestinian right to self-determination and to sovereignty over that territory. Resolution A/RES/80/195, adopted on 15 December 2025 and titled The right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, again ties that right to a two-state outcome. A legal study prepared in 2023 for the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People states that continued occupation breaches the Palestinian right to external self-determination, which it defines as including full independence and statehood. The International Committee of the Red Cross, in a statement issued in 2024, treats the West Bank including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip as occupied territory to which the law of belligerent occupation applies.

The base rate is the character of the instruments rather than their number. Two are General Assembly resolutions, adopted under the Assembly’s recommendatory function and recorded as vote counts. One is an expert legal study commissioned by a committee, an argued position rather than a measurement. One is a statement by a humanitarian organization on which body of law it considers applicable. A position paper issued by an independent commission of inquiry under the Human Rights Council in the 2023 to 2024 period reaches the further conclusion that the occupation has become unlawful by reason of permanence and annexation measures, and it too is an argued finding by an expert body.

So the framing is repeated, datable and attributable to named bodies. What no instrument in this set supplies is an adjudicated determination binding on the parties, and the report notes that as a fact about the record rather than about the framing.

Which obligations did the World Court attach to Palestinian statehood?

The General Assembly endorsed the 19 July 2024 advisory opinion on 18 September 2024 by a recorded vote of 124 in favour to 14 against, with 43 abstentions and 12 of the 193 members not voting. The endorsement is a recorded political act; the opinion it endorsed remains advisory.

Source: United Nations General Assembly recorded vote, 18 September 2024.

In the opinion itself the Court set out consequences in the operative part: that Israel is under an obligation to bring its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory to an end as rapidly as possible, to cease new settlement activity, to evacuate settlers, and to make reparation for damage caused. It further stated that other states are under an obligation not to recognise as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining it, and that international organizations are under a corresponding duty. The Court grounded the illegality in two rules it identified as violated: the prohibition on the acquisition of territory by force, and the right of peoples to self-determination.

The Court addressed statehood indirectly rather than by ordering one. The obligations it stated run to ending an unlawful presence and to not sustaining it, not to establishing a state on a timetable. That distinction is what the 2025 International and Comparative Law Quarterly article examines: whether unlawfulness in this case is derived from the denial of self-determination or from the law governing the use of force, two routes with different consequences for what must follow.

The legal weight is stated plainly. An advisory opinion is delivered at the request of an authorised organ and states the Court’s view of the law; it is not a judgment in a contentious case between parties, and the General Assembly resolution endorsing it is a recommendation carrying the count above. Israel did not participate in the oral proceedings and rejects the opinion’s conclusions.

How did the Knesset vote on Palestinian statehood in 2024?

The July resolution passed 68 to 9, with 43 of the 120 members not recorded either way.

Israel’s parliament had recorded a position on the adjacent question five months earlier. In February 2024 the plenum backed the government’s rejection of any unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state, with 99 members voting in support; published counts of the votes against that motion differ, so this report states the 99 and not a margin. The July text is directed at the establishment of a state rather than at its recognition by other governments.

Source: Knesset plenum record, 18 July 2024. The February 2024 motion on unilateral recognition is a separate vote and is not plotted, because published counts of its votes against differ.

The resolution adopted on 18 July 2024 opposed the establishment of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River and passed 68 to 9. Of the 77 members who recorded a position on that text, 68 voted in favour, 88.3% of those recording, with 43 members of the 120-seat chamber not recorded.

The two texts are not interchangeable, and their subjects differ. The 18 July resolution addresses the establishment of a state in the territory itself. The February motion addresses recognition of such a state by other governments without a negotiated agreement, a question about the conduct of third states rather than about the territory’s administration. Members who recorded support for the first text were not all recorded on the second.

Two features of these records matter for the question. First, they are recorded votes in a national legislature, the highest-checkability tier available on what Israel’s elected chamber holds, and they place the parliamentary position and the occupied territory in the same sentence by their own wording. Second, they are resolutions of the plenum, not statutes: they express the chamber’s position and do not themselves alter the legal status of any territory or create an administrative measure. Nothing in either text changes the law under which the West Bank and East Jerusalem are administered.

What reasons does Israel state for rejecting statehood now?

Israel states two grounds in the resolution texts themselves: that a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River would constitute an existential danger to Israel and its citizens, and that establishing one in the aftermath of the 7 October 2023 attack would reward that attack. Israel’s Foreign Ministry counted 48 hostages still held as of 14 September 2025, the security premise the resolutions invoke.

That count is Israel’s own. The Permanent Mission of Israel to the Multilateral Organizations in France, in a position statement updated 17 September 2025, reports 207 hostages returned or recovered as of 14 September 2025, 148 alive and 59 deceased, and 48 remaining in captivity 712 days after the abductions, living and deceased. It is a figure published by a party to the conflict and is not independently verified.

The security argument the resolutions make about future arrangements sits alongside Israel’s own account of past failure. The Israel Security Agency published findings of its own investigation into 7 October in 2025, stating that Hamas invasion plans were detected by Israeli intelligence in 2018 and again in greater detail in 2022, and that, in the agency’s own words, “these plans were never fully processed as an imminent threat, which led to a lack of preparation.” The agency states the attack could have been prevented had it acted differently. This is a party investigating itself, and every use of it carries that label.

Israel’s stated position on the current operation, in the same Foreign Ministry statement, is framed around the return of hostages and the dismantling of Hamas military capability rather than around the territory’s permanent status. The resolutions of July 2024 are the place where the chamber connects the two, by naming the establishment of a Palestinian state in the territory as itself a security question. Whether the security rationale is sound is a judgement about the future; what the record fixes is that this is the rationale the texts state, in the wording they use, on the dates they were adopted, and it is the argument that any reading of the two-state solution has to engage.

How much of the Israeli public opposes a Palestinian state?

Press-reported Israeli polling puts opposition well above a majority. JNS, reporting survey findings in its 2024 to 2025 coverage, carried a poll in which 71% of respondents opposed the establishment of a Palestinian state, alongside 68% supporting Israeli sovereignty in the territory.

Source: JNS, reporting survey findings, 2024 to 2025. Fielding bodies and sample sizes not stated in the reporting.

A separate survey, also reported by JNS, found 64% of respondents opposing Palestinian statehood even in exchange for normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia, which sets the opposition against a stated diplomatic benefit rather than in the abstract. The Jerusalem Post reported in 2025 that polling showed strong opposition to a Palestinian state.

These are press-reported figures and are handled as such. The reporting available does not state the fielding organization, the sample size, the field dates or a sampling error for either survey, so no confidence bound can be attached to the shares and the base is “respondents” to an unstated instrument rather than a defined national sample. That is a limit on the precision of the number, not on its direction: two separately reported surveys and a third report point the same way, and no survey reported in this period points the other way.

For comparison, the Israeli survey instruments that do publish their methods measure adjacent subjects, not this one. The Israel Democracy Institute’s September 2024 survey of 1,000 adults, 800 interviewed in Hebrew and 200 in Arabic, with a maximum sampling error of 3.10 points at 95% confidence, measured assessments of the army’s ethical conduct rather than views on statehood. The Jewish People Policy Institute’s May 2022 survey of 1,070 weighted questionnaires among the Israeli Jewish public, with a 3.1 point error, measured views of the army. On statehood itself the published record for Israeli opinion runs through press reporting, and the figures above are what that reporting carries.

Does the law of occupation address a future sovereign?

The law of occupation regulates administration, not sovereignty. Article 42 of the 1907 Hague Regulations defines territory as occupied when “it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army,” and Article 43 requires the occupying power to take all measures in its power to restore and ensure public order and safety while respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country.

Article 55 of the same Regulations casts the occupier as administrator and usufructuary of public buildings, real estate, forests and agricultural estates, a formulation that presumes the occupier holds and manages rather than owns. The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 adds protections for the civilian population, including the Article 49 prohibitions on forcible transfer and deportation, whose sixth paragraph provides that the occupying power “shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies,” the clause on which the legal argument about settlements turns.

What these instruments do not contain is any provision about a successor state. They do not create one, withhold one, set a date for one, or name who holds sovereign title in occupied territory. They also state no maximum duration: the framework applies for as long as effective control lasts, which is the reading the International Committee of the Red Cross restates in its 2024 statement on the applicable law.

That silence is the structural point on which the arguments in this dispute divide. The independent commission of inquiry established under the Human Rights Council argues in its position paper that permanence and de jure and de facto annexation measures change the legal character of the situation, so that an administration presented as temporary becomes something the framework was not written to license. The 2025 International and Comparative Law Quarterly article works the same seam from the other end, asking which body of law supplies the illegality once the occupation’s duration and measures are conceded. Both arguments exist because occupation law addresses the administration of territory and leaves the identity of the future sovereign to other rules, including the right of self-determination and the prohibition on acquiring territory by force.

How many states recognize Palestine, and when did that change?

The General Assembly adopted the resolution on the rights and privileges of Palestine at the United Nations by 143 votes to 9.

That vote, resolution ES-10/23 of 10 May 2024, is the checkable tier here: 25 members abstained and 16 of the 193 members did not vote.

Source: Recognitions as announced by each named state, 2024 to 2025.

The membership question was decided in a different chamber. Palestine’s application for full United Nations membership came to a Security Council vote on 18 April 2024, where the draft resolution recommending membership received 12 votes in favour, 1 against and 2 abstentions, and was not adopted because the negative vote was cast by a permanent member. The General Assembly text of 10 May 2024 followed, extending additional rights and privileges short of membership.

Recognition by individual states moved in two clusters. Spain, Ireland and Norway announced recognition on 28 May 2024; Slovenia’s parliament approved recognition on 4 June 2024 and Armenia announced on 21 June 2024. A second cluster came sixteen months later, with the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Portugal announcing on 21 September 2025 and France on 22 September 2025.

No single official register publishes a running total of recognitions, so a count circulating as a total is an aggregation by whoever assembled it rather than a figure any body measures. The dated announcements above are individually checkable, and the recorded votes give the two counts that are.

The register this section reports is diplomatic status, and it moves independently of the territorial one. Between May 2024 and September 2025 the number of governments recognising Palestinian statehood rose by the announcements listed, while the administration of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the Knesset resolutions of July 2024 addressing it, are recorded in the sections above. The two registers were changing at the same time in opposite directions.

The scholarly disagreement is not about who exercises control. A 2025 article in the International and Comparative Law Quarterly, published by Cambridge University Press, examines whether the unlawfulness identified in the 2024 advisory opinion follows from the denial of self-determination or from the law governing the use of force, two derivations that carry different consequences for what an occupying power must do next.

The distinction is technical and load-bearing. If illegality flows from the ius ad bellum, the wrong lies in the continued presence itself and the remedy is withdrawal. If it flows from self-determination, the wrong lies in the measures that foreclose a people’s political future, and the remedy runs to those measures. The Court’s opinion invokes both routes, which is why the derivation is contested rather than settled.

A separate line of scholarship argues the characterisation question directly. John Dugard and John Reynolds, writing in the European Journal of International Law in 2013 under the title Apartheid, International Law, and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, argue that the treaty definition of apartheid is applicable to the situation in the territory, a position that treats the occupation’s administration as the object of analysis rather than its duration. Benjamin Rubin, in the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law entry “Israel, Occupied Territories” last updated in October 2009, sets out the competing accounts of the territories’ status as they stood then, as a reference statement of the dispute.

Recognition itself has drawn scholarly caution from another direction. A commentary published by Security in Context under the title Recognizing Palestinian Statehood: Some Critical Comments questions what recognition changes on the ground, given that the attributes of statehood in international law include effective control over territory and population.

What no named position in this literature disputes is the factual predicate: that Israel has exercised effective control over the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967, and that the measures taken there are documented. The disagreement runs over which legal rule that predicate violates, what follows from the violation, and whether the vocabulary of occupation, annexation or apartheid best describes it.

Methodology

This report reads the record on a question about a relationship between two things, so it separates the tiers of evidence rather than merging them.

The recorded votes are the primary tier. The Knesset resolution of 18 July 2024, with its vote count and the 120-seat chamber, comes from the plenum record. The General Assembly counts for ES-10/23 of 10 May 2024, the endorsement resolution of 18 September 2024, and the Security Council vote of 18 April 2024 are recorded votes, reported here with all four categories so the totals reconcile to the membership of each body. Resolutions A/RES/58/292 (2004) and A/RES/80/195 (15 December 2025) are cited for their adopted text.

The treaty texts, the 1907 Hague Regulations and the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, are quoted from the instruments and are the tier on which the section on occupation law rests. The absence of any provision in them addressing a successor state is a fact about the texts.

The 19 July 2024 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, the 2023 legal study for the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, the position paper of the independent commission of inquiry under the Human Rights Council, and the 2024 statement of the International Committee of the Red Cross are named and dated as the positions those bodies hold, with their instrument type stated in each case. An advisory opinion is not a judgment binding on a party, and a General Assembly resolution is a recommendation; both facts are stated where the instruments are used.

Figures published by Israel, the Foreign Ministry hostage and aid counts and the Israel Security Agency’s account of its own pre-attack intelligence, are labelled as that party’s own reporting on its own conduct and are not independently verified.

The Israeli opinion figures are press-reported. The reporting available states neither the fielding organization, the sample size, the field dates nor a sampling error, so the shares carry no confidence bound and their base is respondents to an unstated instrument. They are not peer-reviewed measurement and are not comparable with the methodologically documented Israeli surveys cited for other subjects.

Where the literature disagrees, the disagreement is named: the 2025 International and Comparative Law Quarterly article on the derivation of illegality, Dugard and Reynolds (2013) on the applicability of the apartheid definition, the Security in Context commentary on what recognition changes, and the Max Planck Encyclopedia entry setting out the competing accounts of status. No official register publishes a running total of state recognitions of Palestine, which is why this report gives dated announcements and recorded votes instead of a total.

Conclusion

The question asks whether one thing is related to the other, and the record answers it in Israel’s own hand. On 18 July 2024 the Knesset opposed the establishment of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River, 68 to 9, and the land named in that sentence is the land Israel has administered since 1967. Five months earlier, 99 members had backed the rejection of unilateral recognition of such a state. The two subjects are joined in the text of the resolutions themselves, and joined again in the security grounds those texts give.

Around that centre the registers move separately and can be read separately. Occupation law, from Article 42 of the 1907 Hague Regulations to Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, governs how a territory is administered and says nothing about who becomes sovereign, which is why the argument has migrated to self-determination and to the prohibition on acquiring territory by force, and why legal scholars now divide over which of the two supplies the illegality rather than over the facts of control. Diplomatic recognition moved in two clusters, 28 May 2024 and 21 to 22 September 2025, while the administration on the ground did not. Israeli opinion, as press reporting carries it, sat at 71% opposed. The advisory opinion of 19 July 2024 arrived a day after the first vote and was endorsed 124 to 14 with 43 abstentions, a count of positions rather than a judgment.

One register counts positions, in a chamber and among governments; the other governs how the territory is administered and names no successor to it. When the count moves and the administration does not, which of the two is the register that answers the question?

Frequently Asked Questions

What does the law of occupation mean by calling the occupier a usufructuary?

Article 55 of the 1907 Hague Regulations treats the occupying power as administrator and usufructuary of public buildings, real estate, forests and agricultural estates in the occupied territory. A usufructuary may use and manage property and take its produce without becoming its owner, which is the legal shape occupation law assumes: control held and exercised, title unchanged.

Has an Israeli court ruled on whether self-determination in Israel is exclusive to the Jewish people?

Yes. Clause 1(c) of Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, adopted in 2018, provides that “the realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People.” On 8 July 2021 the Supreme Court of Israel, sitting as High Court of Justice in HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset, dismissed fifteen petitions against the law and upheld it, while holding that the Knesset as constituent authority has no power, even by Basic Law, to deny the core character of the state as Jewish and democratic.

Does the law of occupation set a maximum duration?

Neither the 1907 Hague Regulations nor the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 states a period after which occupation ends or becomes unlawful; the framework applies for as long as effective control lasts, the reading the International Committee of the Red Cross restated in its 2024 statement on the applicable law. The argument that duration and annexation measures change the legal character is made by the independent commission of inquiry under the Human Rights Council, as that body’s own position.

What does Israel’s own security agency say it knew before 7 October 2023?

The Israel Security Agency, publishing findings of its own investigation in 2025, states that Hamas invasion plans were detected by Israeli intelligence in 2018 and again in greater detail in 2022, and that “these plans were never fully processed as an imminent threat, which led to a lack of preparation.” This is a party investigating its own conduct, and the agency states the attack could have been prevented had it acted differently.

How many people live in the territory the resolutions name?

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics counted 2,881,687 residents of the West Bank in its 2017 census, with a reference date of 1 December 2017, alongside 1,899,291 in the Gaza Strip. East Jerusalem could not be directly enumerated in that round, so administrative estimates were used there. That census is the most recent full enumeration of the territory, which is why the later totals in the United Nations and World Bank series are projections off it rather than counts.

How has American opinion on establishing a Palestinian state moved?

Gallup’s 2025 reading put 55% of US adults in favour of establishing an independent Palestinian state, in line with its readings since 2020. On its separate forced-choice sympathies question, fielded 3 to 16 February 2025 among 1,004 adults with a maximum sampling error of about 4 points, 46% sympathized more with the Israelis, the lowest in 25 years of that trend, and 33% with the Palestinians. The sympathies question offers a choice between two named parties, so it measures relative sympathy rather than support for any particular arrangement.

Sources

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