The Hanover Institute for Public Policy
Data Reportby The Hanover InstituteSeptember 29, 2026

Why Is Israel’s Occupation Called the Longest in Modern History? Reading the 1967 Orders, the Interim Agreement and Israel’s Own Court Record

The occupation dates to June 1967, 59 years by 2026. What the military orders, Oslo II and Israel’s own court record show about its length.

OccupationWest BankGazaOslo AccordsIsraeli Supreme CourtInternational Law
Why Is Israel’s Occupation Called the Longest in Modern History? Reading the 1967 Orders, the Interim Agreement and Israel’s Own Court Record

The Israeli occupation is described as the longest in modern history because it has run for 59 years, from June 1967 to 2026, a span dated both by Israel’s own first military orders and by the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion of July 2024. A child born in the West Bank the summer those orders took effect turns 59 this year, and on the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics’ own projections, 1,346,888 West Bank residents outside East Jerusalem had not yet turned 18 at mid-2023. The duration is documented. The superlative is not, because no body publishes a ranking of occupations against which it can be checked. The sharper tension sits inside Israel’s own record: a 1979 Supreme Court judgment treats the occupation as temporary, and a 2012 government-appointed commission holds the classical law of occupation inapplicable.

Key Findings

  • Commander of IDF Forces in the West Bank Area (1967): Military Order 59 fixes its “determining day” as 7 June 1967; June 1967 to 2026 is 59 years, the Institute’s arithmetic on that date.
  • Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (2023): 1,346,888 West Bank residents outside East Jerusalem were under 18 at mid-2023 on the Bureau’s own projections, every one born after mid-2005; a further 1,046,400 were under 18 in Gaza.
  • Israel and the PLO (1995): the Interim Agreement set permanent-status negotiations to begin “not later than May 4, 1996,” 30 years before 2026, and kept authority over areas outside the Palestinian Council’s jurisdiction with Israel “through its military government.”
  • Israeli Supreme Court (1979): in HCJ 390/79, decided 5 to 0 on 22 October 1979, the Court held that a military administration cannot create facts on the ground “intended to exist past the end of the military rule.”
  • Levy, Shapira and Baker (2012): a commission appointed by the Prime Minister and the Minister of Justice concluded that the classical laws of occupation “cannot be considered applicable” to Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria.

How long has the occupation lasted, by the Court’s own dating?

Fifty-nine years, on the Institute’s arithmetic. The International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion of 19 July 2024 dates Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza to June 1967, and June 1967 to 2026 is 59 years. No body publishes that duration as a statistic; it is derived from the Court’s date.

The Court’s date matches the first instruments of the military government. Military Order 59, the Order Concerning Government Property, was signed on 31 July 1967 by the Commander of IDF Forces in the West Bank Area and published in booklet 5 of the Collection of Proclamations, Orders and Appointments (Commander of IDF Forces in the West Bank Area, 1967). Its Article 1 defines “the determining day” as 28 Iyar 5727, 7 June 1967, and treats as government property whatever belonged to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan or any other enemy state on that day. Article 7 brings the order into force on 7 July 1967, 24 days before the date it was signed.

Article 2 is one sentence: “הממונה רשאי ליטול את החזקה ברכוש ממשלתי ולנקוט כל צעד הנראה לו דרוש לכך.” In the Institute’s working rendering, the Custodian “may take possession of government property and take any step that seems to him necessary for that.” The order exists in Hebrew and Arabic only; no official English text was published. Article 8 names the order for the “West Bank Area” (אזור הגדה המערבית), the name in use before the area was renamed later in 1967.

The instrument did not stop in 1967. The Military Advocate General’s own index lists nine amending orders, the last of them Order 1508, so the 1967 text is the starting point of a legal regime that the issuing authority still maintains.

Source: Military Order 59 (1967); HCJ 390/79 (1979); Israel and the PLO, Interim Agreement (1995); HCJ 8887/06 (2011); Levy Report (2012). Duration is the Institute’s arithmetic on the 7 June 1967 determining day.

Is it often said no modern occupation has lasted longer?

Yes. It is often said that no military occupation in modern history has lasted longer than Israel’s, and the duration behind the claim is documented: 59 years from June 1967, on the dating in the International Court of Justice’s 2024 opinion. The ranking is not documented. The Court calls the occupation prolonged and sets it against no other occupation.

The superlative has named, dated holders. Al Jazeera’s feature on the 1967 war, first posted in June 2017 and republished on 4 June 2018 as “The Naksa: How Israel occupied the whole of Palestine in 1967,” states in its own voice: “The occupation is the longest in modern history.” In June 2017 the European Council on Foreign Relations published Valentina Azarova’s report “Israel’s unlawfully prolonged occupation: consequences under an integrated legal framework.” On 23 October 2019 Anadolu Agency, Turkey’s state news agency, quoted Michael Lynk, then UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories: “Israel has occupied the Palestinian territory for more than 52 years, the longest belligerent occupation in the modern world.”

Each of the three states the characterisation. None publishes a list of occupations with start and end dates against which “longest” can be tested, and the Special Rapporteur’s phrase is a mandate holder’s characterisation rather than a finding of any UN organ.

That leaves the base rate absent. No published ranking of military occupations by duration was located, so the word “longest” has no measured denominator. What the record supports is the concession: an occupation dated by the occupying state’s own orders to June 1967, still described as continuing by the Court in 2024. The superlative is a characterisation of that documented 59 years, repeated widely since at least its fiftieth year, and not a ranked finding by any body that publishes its comparison.

Which 1967 territories still count toward that duration?

Three of the territories Israel took in 1967 carry the duration: the International Court of Justice’s 2024 opinion defines the Occupied Palestinian Territory as the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. Sinai and the Golan Heights, taken in the same war, sit outside that definition, and Gaza’s inclusion after 2005 turns on a separate test of control.

The wider set of 1967 territories is laid out in the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law. Rubin (2009), in an entry last updated in October 2009, covers the West Bank including East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, Sinai and Lebanon, and the operation of Israeli law in them. His entry treats Sinai, returned to Egypt in 1982, and the Golan Heights, placed under Israeli law by the Knesset in 1981, as cases distinct from the Palestinian territories. The entry predates everything after 2009 and speaks only to the doctrine as it then stood.

Israel’s own signed text binds the two Palestinian territories together. Article XXXI(8) of the 1995 Interim Agreement records that the two sides “view the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as a single territorial unit” (Israel and the PLO, 1995). That clause is a joint undertaking of the parties, not a finding by any court.

Gaza is where the counting diverges. The Court’s 2024 opinion records that Israel withdrew its settlements and ground forces from Gaza in 2005, and holds that Israel’s obligations under the law of occupation there continue in proportion to the effective control it retains. The duration claim therefore runs undisputed for the West Bank and East Jerusalem and depends, for Gaza after 2005, on that test, which the Institute examines in its report on the effective-control test for Gaza. A figure for “how long Gaza has been occupied” is a figure about which test the writer applied.

How many Palestinians have lived their entire lives under it?

At least 1,346,888 in the West Bank, on the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics’ own projections: that is the Bureau’s count of West Bank residents under 18 at mid-2023, every one of them born after mid-2005, excluding “those parts of Jerusalem which were annexed by Israeli Occupation in 1967,” in the Bureau’s own wording. The Bureau publishes no count of residents born after June 1967, so the figure is a lower bound.

The count is the sum of the Bureau’s two published bands, 688,510 males and 658,378 females (Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2023). Everyone in it was born into a West Bank that the occupying state’s own orders, the 1995 Interim Agreement and the Court’s 2024 opinion all treat as under military government, so its inclusion does not depend on any contested test.

Gaza is counted separately, because it does depend on one. The Bureau puts Gaza’s under-18 population at 1,046,400 at mid-2023. Those children were born after Israel completed its withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, so whether they have lived their whole lives under occupation turns on the effective-control test set out in the previous section, and the two figures are not added here.

The shares show the age structure. Children under 18 were 47% of Gaza’s population, 41% of the West Bank’s and about 44% of the Palestinian total at mid-2023. At the other end, persons 65 and over, all born before mid-1958 and so before the occupation began, were 4% of the Palestinian total.

Every figure here is a projection, not a count. The last measured base is the 2017 census, which enumerated 4,780,978 residents, 2,881,687 in the West Bank and 1,899,291 in Gaza (Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2018). The mid-2023 figures predate October 2023. The Bureau is a Palestinian official body reporting its own estimates.

Source: Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Palestinian Child Day release, 5 April 2023. West Bank figures exclude the parts of Jerusalem annexed in 1967.

Why did the Oslo arrangements not end the military government?

Because the 1995 Interim Agreement between Israel and the PLO transferred specified powers and deferred the rest to permanent-status talks due to begin not later than 4 May 1996. Meanwhile, under Article XVII(4)(a), “Israel, through its military government, has the authority over areas that are not under the territorial jurisdiction of the Council” (Israel and the PLO, 1995).

The signed text sorts the West Bank into three areas. Article XI(3) defines Areas A and B by lines and shading on a map, and Area C residually as “areas of the West Bank outside Areas A and B.” In A and B, Article XI(2) transfers to the Council “All civil powers and responsibilities, including planning and zoning”; in C, Israel transfers only “civil powers and responsibilities not relating to territory.” Article XVII(1) carves out of the Council’s jurisdiction altogether “Jerusalem, settlements, specified military locations, Palestinian refugees, borders, foreign relations and Israelis.” The detail of that jurisdiction is set out in the Institute’s report on the interim agreement’s jurisdiction clauses.

The same instrument anticipated its own end. Annex I, Article I(5) states that after the Council’s inauguration “the Israeli Civil Administration will be dissolved and the Israeli military government will be withdrawn,” and three further redeployments were to be completed within 18 months of that inauguration. Article XXXI(5) set the talks date, and Article XXXI(6) provided that nothing in the agreement “shall prejudice or preempt the outcome of the negotiations on the permanent status.”

The text therefore carries both clauses: a withdrawal of the military government, and the military government’s retained authority pending permanent status. The 18-month schedule and the 1996 date are what the text promised, not what happened. The later record shows the outcome: 30 years after the talks date, the International Court of Justice in 2024 still treated the territory as occupied. The interim period that was to bridge occupation and settlement has become most of the occupation’s length.

What did Israel’s High Court say about permanence in 1979?

By 5 votes to 0, on 22 October 1979, Israel’s Supreme Court held in HCJ 390/79 that “a military administration cannot create within its territory ‘facts on the ground’ for the purposes of its military needs that were in advance intended to exist past the end of the military rule in that area,” and annulled a requisition of private land for the Elon Moreh settlement (Israeli Supreme Court, 1979).

The judgment rested on two grounds. The first was factual: Deputy President Landau found that “the military consideration was subordinate to the primary, political decision to build the settlement,” so the requisition failed a dominant-purpose test. The second, which he said “stands independently,” was the permanence point quoted above: a temporary requisition cannot support a settlement intended to outlast military rule. The Court treated the Hague Regulations “as customary international law” that “do indeed bind the military administration in Judea and Samaria.”

The ruling had limits of its own. Landau accepted that requisitioning private land for a civilian settlement “is potentially justified under Article 52 of the Hague Regulations” where military needs genuinely drove it, and the Court declined to decide the case under Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which it held not justiciable in an Israeli court. The order annulled covered the petitioners’ roughly 125 dunams of an approximately 700-dunam seizure. The English text is an unofficial translation published by the Cardozo Israeli Supreme Court Project.

The principle recurred. In HCJ 8887/06, on 2 August 2011, the Court issued a final order requiring the State to evacuate the Migron outpost by 31 March 2012, after the State conceded that the land was registered Palestinian private property “and that the Outpost, Migron, is illegal” (Israeli Supreme Court, 2011, 2014). The Institute’s report on the occupation-law standard for settlements follows that line of cases.

Does Israel’s government accept that the West Bank is occupied?

Not on its own commission’s reading. The Levy Report, signed on 21 June 2012 by a three-member commission appointed by the Prime Minister and the Minister of Justice, concluded that “the classical laws of ‘occupation’ as set out in the relevant international conventions cannot be considered applicable” to Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria (Levy, Shapira and Baker, 2012).

The full sentence at paragraph 65 grounds the conclusion in time and history: the laws cannot be applied “to the unique and sui generis historic and legal circumstances of Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria spanning over decades,” and “therefore the establishment of settlements cannot in and of itself be considered to be illegal.” The duration that others cite as evidence of an unlawfully prolonged occupation is cited here as part of the reason the occupation framework does not fit.

The commission was not uncritical of the state. At paragraph 65 it wrote that the picture of settlement activity before it “does not befit the behavior of a state that prides itself on, and is committed to the rule of law.” Its closing paragraph left the next step to the cabinet: “Should the government decide to adopt our recommendations, it will be necessary to implement those principles in detail.” Its Conclusions section, paragraph 65, is the government’s own English translation; the rest of the report circulates in a translation by Regavim, an organisation that made submissions to the commission.

Set beside the record in the previous sections, Israel’s official documents speak in two voices. The 1967 order names a “West Bank Area” and issues under a military commander’s authority. The 1979 Court applied the Hague Regulations as binding on “the military administration in Judea and Samaria.” The 2012 commission, appointed by the government that answers as respondent before that Court, held the classical law of occupation inapplicable. The report’s view is a party’s own commissioned legal position on a contested question, and it is stated here as that.

Does length alone make an occupation unlawful?

No, on the International Court of Justice’s own reasoning. Its 2024 opinion states that “The fact that an occupation is prolonged does not in itself change its legal status under international humanitarian law,” and rests its finding that Israel’s continued presence is unlawful, adopted by 11 votes to 4, on obligations it calls erga omnes: the prohibition on acquiring territory by force and the Palestinian right to self-determination.

The Court named the obligations at paragraph 274: “Among the obligations erga omnes violated by Israel are the obligation to respect the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and the obligation arising from the prohibition of the use of force to acquire territory as well as certain of its obligations under international humanitarian law and international human rights law.” The finding rests on policies the Court treated as annexation and on self-determination, not on the calendar.

The margin matters. The unlawfulness finding in paragraph 285(3) and the obligation to end the presence in 285(4) are the narrowest in the opinion. Vice-President Sebutinde voted against every substantive subparagraph and appended a dissenting opinion; Judges Tomka, Abraham and Aurescu voted against subparagraphs (3) and (4). The opinion is advisory, rendered on a General Assembly request, and binds no state.

The Court adds that “the passage of time does not release the occupying Power from the obligations that it bears.” That separation undoes the common phrase “unlawfully prolonged,” which the European Council on Foreign Relations used in the title of its 2017 report. On the Court’s reasoning, the two words describe different things: the prolongation is a fact about duration, and the unlawfulness is a finding about annexation and self-determination. Israel’s own record draws a parallel line. The 1979 Court held that temporariness limits what the military may build, and the 2012 commission held that length helps place the territory outside the occupation framework. Neither treats 59 years, on its own, as the legal question.

What does the Court say must happen, and how fast?

End the unlawful presence “as rapidly as possible,” the obligation in paragraph 285(4) of the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion of 19 July 2024, carried by 11 votes to 4. The phrase sets no calendar date. The only obligation the Court framed as immediate is the halt to new settlement activity.

The remaining operative subparagraphs each carry their own recorded vote. Subparagraph (5) requires Israel “to cease immediately all new settlement activities, and to evacuate all settlers,” by 14 votes to 1. Subparagraph (6) requires Israel “to make reparation for the damage caused,” by 14 votes to 1. Subparagraph (7) places all states “under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence” and “not to render aid or assistance in maintaining” it, by 12 votes to 3, and subparagraph (8) extends that duty to international organizations by the same margin. Subparagraph (9) asks the General Assembly and the Security Council to “consider the precise modalities and further action required,” again 12 to 3.

The votes come from the dispositif at paragraph 285 of the opinion as printed in the ICJ Reports. The Court’s own press release on the opinion reproduces the conclusions but omits every tally.

The contrast with the other end dates in the record is exact. The only fixed dates for ending the interim arrangements were set by the parties themselves in 1995: redeployments within 18 months of the Council’s inauguration and permanent-status talks by 4 May 1996. Those dates have passed. The Court, three decades on, replaced them with a standard of speed and assigned the working-out of the modalities to two political organs. At 59 years, the occupation has outlived both its signed deadlines, and the one timetable now on record is expressed as “as rapidly as possible.”

Methodology and limitations

The evidence falls into six types, each labelled where it is used. The primary instrument is Military Order 59 of 1967, read in the Hebrew as published by the Military Advocate General; no official English text exists, and the English above is the Institute’s working rendering. The signed treaty text is the 1995 Interim Agreement in the English published by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a party to it. The domestic court records are HCJ 390/79 (1979) and HCJ 8887/06 (2011), read in the Cardozo project’s unofficial English translations; the Hebrew governs. The government-commissioned review is the Levy Report (2012), quoted from its Conclusions section in the government’s own translation. The official statistics are the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics’ mid-2023 projections, built off the 2017 census, and its end-2025 brief; they are a party’s own estimates, and the West Bank figures exclude the parts of Jerusalem annexed in 1967. The reference work is Rubin’s 2009 encyclopedia entry, current only to October 2009.

The International Court of Justice’s 2024 advisory opinion is named for its dating, its reasoning and its recorded votes, which are records; its conclusions are attributed to the Court and are not the Institute’s evidence.

Three figures are the Institute’s own arithmetic: 59 years (June 1967 to 2026), 1,346,888 (the sum of the Bureau’s two West Bank under-18 bands) and 30 years (4 May 1996 to 2026). No published ranking of military occupations by duration was located, so the superlative has no measured comparison group. The status of Gaza after 2005 depends on the effective-control test and is contested. Israel’s own court and commission records diverge on whether occupation law applies. The holders of the superlative named in the text, Al Jazeera, the European Council on Foreign Relations and the UN Special Rapporteur quoted by Anadolu Agency, are named as holders of a characterisation and are not used as evidence.

Conclusion

So why is it called the longest occupation in modern history? Because the clock is documented and the comparison is not. The occupying state’s own order fixes 7 June 1967 as its determining day, the Court dated the occupation the same way in 2024, and 59 years separate that day from this one. No body publishes the list that would make “longest” a ranked fact.

What the record does establish is sharper than the superlative. The 1967 order is still in the issuing authority’s index, amended nine times. The 1995 agreement promised a withdrawal of the military government and permanent-status talks by 1996, and both dates are 30 years gone. Israel’s Supreme Court, unanimously in 1979, treated the occupation as temporary; Israel’s own commission, in 2012, treated the law of occupation as inapplicable. At least 1,346,888 West Bank residents in mid-2023, and 1,046,400 more in Gaza, were under 18 and so born almost four decades after the first order was signed. And the Court, asked what must happen, answered with a speed rather than a date.

Every instrument in this record that named an end point has passed it. If an occupation is lawful only as a temporary state, and the only dated deadlines ever set for it have expired, which body now measures how long temporary is allowed to last?

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Israel’s official population count include East Jerusalem?

Yes. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counts Jerusalem, including the East Jerusalem neighbourhoods annexed after 1967, as a single municipal population, which passed one million at the end of 2023 with Arabs at 39.5% of residents (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2024). The Palestinian bureau’s West Bank figures exclude the same annexed areas, so the two series count East Jerusalem on opposite sides.

Do Israel’s national population totals include West Bank settlers?

Yes. The Central Bureau of Statistics put Israel’s population at about 10.148 million in September 2025 and counts both East Jerusalem residents and West Bank settlers inside that total (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025). That scope choice differs from the international convention of reporting the territories separately.

How many military orders has the military government issued since 1967?

About 1,800, according to the Military Advocate General’s Corps, which states that all of them are published in the Collection of Proclamations, Orders and Appointments. Order 59, on government property, is one of the earliest and is still listed with its nine amendments (Commander of IDF Forces in the West Bank Area, 1967).

Does the 1995 agreement say how much of the West Bank is Area C?

No. The Interim Agreement defines Areas A and B by lines and shading on a map and Area C as whatever lies outside them, and it contains no territorial percentage (Israel and the PLO, 1995). Any share of the West Bank attributed to Area C comes from a later measurement by some other body.

How many unauthorized outposts did Israel’s own 2005 review count?

The opinion prepared for the Prime Minister’s Office by Talya Sason counted 105 unauthorized outposts in March 2005, a figure she wrote “probably does not reflect the true number” (Prime Minister’s Office of Israel, 2005). She found state bodies had financed construction “without a resolution by the political echelon.”

Has Israel’s Supreme Court ordered a whole outpost removed?

Yes. On 25 December 2014, in HCJ 9949/08, the Court ordered the removal of the Amona outpost, built on privately owned Palestinian land, within two years, and on 14 November 2016 it refused the government’s request for further delay (Israeli Supreme Court, 2011, 2014).

Sources

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