Does “Occupation” Still Describe Israel? What the Word Designates, the Test It Turns On, and What Each Register Counts

“Occupation” is one of the few words in this conflict that a foreign ministry, a military order and a protest placard all use, and in its legal usage it names parcels of territory rather than a state: Benjamin Rubin’s 2009 entry on Israel and the occupied territories in the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law runs to 125 numbered paragraphs and treats five separately named territories, each with its own dates. Israel’s own Supreme Court applied that body of law to the West Bank in 1979 and has continued to reason inside it; a commission appointed by the Prime Minister concluded in 2012 that the classical law does not apply at all. Both positions sit on the Israeli record, and each register that counts people in these territories counts them differently.

Key Findings

• Benjamin Rubin’s 2009 Max Planck Encyclopedia entry, the standard reference treatment, organises the subject by territory rather than by state, covering the West Bank including East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, Sinai and Lebanon, and was last updated in October 2009.
• Israel’s Supreme Court held unanimously on 22 October 1979, in HCJ 390/79, that the Hague Regulations bind the military administration in the West Bank as customary international law, while expressly declining to decide the Fourth Geneva Convention question.
• A commission appointed by the Prime Minister and the Minister of Justice on 13 February 2012 concluded in its report of 21 June 2012 that the classical laws of occupation “cannot be considered applicable” to Israel’s West Bank presence, and its own closing paragraph left adoption to the government.
• The Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories opens its permit policy document of 8 February 2022 by stating that under a 1967 military order the West Bank “is a closed military area and not to be entered or exited without a permit issued on behalf of the military commander.”
• The Security Council adopted resolution 2803 on 17 November 2025 by thirteen votes to none with two abstentions, creating a Board of Peace as a transitional administration over Gaza authorised until 31 December 2027.

Which territories does the word occupation actually designate?

The word attaches to parcels of territory, not to a state. Benjamin Rubin’s 2009 entry on the subject in the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law runs to 125 numbered paragraphs and is organised territory by territory: the West Bank including East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, Sinai and Lebanon, together with the operation of Israeli law in them.

That structure is the answer to the question as most readers ask it. A doctrinal reference work on this subject does not have a chapter on Israel; it has chapters on places held, each with its own start date and its own instruments. Rubin’s entry was last updated in October 2009, which means it does not know the General Assembly’s resolution on Palestine of 2012, Palestine’s accession to the International Criminal Court in 2015, or anything decided since. It is citable for the doctrinal framework as it stood in 2009, with that date in the sentence, and for nothing after.

The parties’ own signed agreement uses the same grammar. In the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement of 28 September 1995, Israel and the PLO stated at Article XI(1), and again at Article XXXI(8), that they “view the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as a single territorial unit.” Article XI(3) then defines Area A and Area B as populated areas “delineated by a red line” and shaded brown and yellow “on attached map No. 1,” and defines Area C residually as the areas of the West Bank outside them.

One consequence is worth recording. The agreement itself carries no territorial percentage: the words “per cent” appear once in the main Agreement, in Article IX on appointments to the Executive Authority, and nowhere in relation to land. The familiar figure that Area C is about 60% of the West Bank is therefore a later measurement by some other body, and belongs to whoever measured it.

Is it often said the term no longer fits?

It is often said, and the fullest Israeli statement of that position is an official one. A commission appointed on 13 February 2012 by the Prime Minister and the Minister of Justice concluded, in a report signed on 21 June 2012 and released on 9 July 2012, that the classical laws of occupation cannot be considered applicable to Israel’s presence in the West Bank.

Its words at paragraph 65 are these: “from the point of view of international law, the classical laws of ‘occupation’ as set out in the relevant international conventions cannot be considered applicable 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.”

Three things travel with that conclusion. First, it is a legal position taken by a commission appointed by the Prime Minister on the legality of Israeli government conduct, and it was never adopted as government policy by the report’s own account: its closing paragraph reads, “Should the government decide to adopt our recommendations, it will be necessary to implement those principles in detail.”

Second, the same commission was sharply critical of the state it reported to. At paragraph 65 it also wrote that “the picture that has been displayed before us regarding Israeli settlement activity in Judea and Samaria does not befit the behavior of a state that prides itself on, and is committed to the rule of law,” and that “all actions on this matter can only be done in accordance with the law.”

Third, the only full English text in circulation was produced by Regavim, a legal advocacy organisation that itself made submissions to the commission and is named in the report as advancing the non-occupation position. The Conclusions and Recommendations section of that file is marked as coming from the original Israeli government translation; the body is the organisation’s. Where the exact wording matters, the Hebrew governs, and a report should say which text it is quoting.

What test decides whether a territory counts as occupied?

The test turns on authority exercised by a military commander, and the instrument Israel’s own Ministry of Defense cited for the West Bank as recently as 8 February 2022 is a military order of 1967. The Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories opens its permit policy document with it, in its own English.

Its first clause reads: “Under the Order Concerning Closed Areas (West Bank Area) (Amendment) (No. 34), 1967, the area of Judea and Samaria is a closed military area and not to be entered or exited without a permit issued on behalf of the military commander.” That is the framework a 2022 Israeli policy document names as the basis for the permits it goes on to quota.

The founding instruments run on the same logic. Military Order 59, signed on 31 July 1967 by the GOC Central Command in his capacity as Commander of IDF Forces in the West Bank Area, created a Custodian of Government Property, defined government property by who owned it on 7 June 1967, and gave the Custodian power to take possession. The order is named in its own text for the West Bank Area rather than for Judea and Samaria, the issuing authority’s index records nine amendments to it, and there is no official English text at all: the Collection of Proclamations, Orders and Appointments prints each order in Hebrew and Arabic only.

The 1995 Interim Agreement then divided authority explicitly rather than ending it. Article XVII(2) gives the Palestinian Council territorial jurisdiction over West Bank territory “except for Area C,” and personal jurisdiction over “all persons, except for Israelis.” Article XVII(4)(a) states that “Israel, through its military government, has the authority over areas that are not under the territorial jurisdiction of the Council, powers and responsibilities not transferred to the Council and Israelis.” Article XVII(1) lists what is carved out entirely: “Jerusalem, settlements, specified military locations, Palestinian refugees, borders, foreign relations and Israelis.”

The agreement also set its own clock. Annex I provided three further redeployments at six-month intervals, to be completed “within 18 months from the date of the inauguration of the Council,” and Article XXXI(5) set permanent status negotiations to commence “not later than May 4, 1996.” That is what the signed text promised in 1995.

Does Israel’s own court record apply the law of occupation?

It does, and it has since 1979. In HCJ 390/79, decided unanimously by a panel of five on 22 October 1979, Israel’s Supreme Court held that the Hague Regulations, “as customary international law, they do indeed bind the military administration in Judea and Samaria,” and annulled an order of possession over land registered to Palestinian owners near Nablus.

What that judgment did not do matters as much. Deputy President Landau accepted that possession of privately owned land for a civilian settlement “is potentially justified under Article 52 of the Hague Regulations,” and the petition succeeded on the facts of the particular requisition, on a dominant-purpose test drawn from administrative law. The court expressly declined to decide Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention, holding that “as part of treaty-based international law, it is not binding law in an Israeli Court.” Justice Witkon added: “It is a mistake to think… that the Geneva Convention does not apply to Judea and Samaria. It does apply, though… it is not ‘justiciable’ in this Court.”

The framework has kept operating. On 2 August 2011, in HCJ 8887/06, the court issued a final order requiring the state to evacuate the outpost of Migron, recording that “the State did not dispute that the lands which constitute the object of the Petition are registered lands under private Palestinian ownership.” On 25 December 2014, in HCJ 9949/08, it ordered the removal of Amona within two years on the same ground.

On 31 December 2014, in HCJ 8091/14, the court reproduced Regulation 119 of the Defence (Emergency) Regulations, 1945 in its current Israeli wording and declined to bar punitive demolition, while holding at paragraph 23 that “the disproportionate use of said authority by the military commander, which amounts to collective punishment that is prohibited under international law, is precluded.” Justice Hayut recorded that the regulation “currently forms part of Israel’s positive law,” preserved by section 10 of Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty. The state’s own submission in that case was that “in the last decade, since 2005, the military commander has exercised the contemplated authority only several times.”

So the Israeli record holds two positions at once: a commissioned review concluding the classical law does not apply, and a judiciary that has reasoned inside it, by name, for more than four decades.

Did the 2005 withdrawal end the test in Gaza?

Israel’s own aid portal records that no aid entered the Gaza Strip between 2 March and 19 May 2025, in the portal’s own words “According to the directive from the political echelon.” The publisher is COGAT, a unit of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, and it is reporting its own operational record as a party to the events.

The withdrawal itself is bracketed by Israeli records. The 1995 Interim Agreement’s Schedule 11 left Gaza’s water systems to the Palestinian Council with one carve-out: “the existing water systems supplying water to the Settlements and the Military Installation Area, and the water systems and resources inside them shall continue to be operated and managed by Mekoroth Water Co.” In March 2005 the opinion prepared at the request of the Prime Minister’s bureau surveyed unauthorized outposts “in Judea, Samaria and Gaza” and counted 105 of them. In Sergio DellaPergola’s territorial accounting for the beginning of 2019, no separate Gaza core-Jewish figure is reported at all.

What Israel publishes about the period since is a record of administered access. Its 2022 permit document, in the section covering the Gaza Strip, provides that departure abroad “shall be through the Allenby Bridge Crossing, solely in escorted groups (shuttles),” and that “As a rule, Palestinians are not granted departure through Ben Gurion Airport, with the exception of BMC permit holders and extremely exceptional unique humanitarian cases (monthly quota of 20).” COGAT’s own workbook carries 32,946 truck rows entering Gaza at four inspection points between 21 October 2023 and 31 May 2024, a count its officers make at those points during inspection, though the per-truck tonnage attached to each row is declared by the shipper.

The economic envelope predates the withdrawal and outlasted it. Under the Protocol on Economic Relations signed in Paris on 29 April 1994, both sides undertook to “maintain the same import policy… as applied by Israel with respect to its importation,” with import-tax revenue cleared “within six working days from the day of collection.” The 1995 Supplement added that “Israel will deduct 3% from each transfer.”

Israel’s position is that it does not occupy Gaza. The records above are the ones each party publishes about control; the 2005 removal of settlements and forces is one dated fact inside that set, not the whole of it.

What did the 2024 World Court opinion change about the word?

It did not change what the word designates. It added a separate finding about legality, and on the narrowest margin in the document: the International Court of Justice held by eleven votes to four, on 19 July 2024, that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful and must be brought to an end as rapidly as possible.

That is an advisory opinion, delivered on a request the General Assembly made on 30 December 2022. It is not a judgment, it arose in no contentious case between parties, and it binds no one. Its English text is authoritative.

The recorded votes are the part of it that is a record, and they are not uniform. The dispositif at paragraph 285 has nine separately voted subparagraphs carrying four different majorities: unanimous on jurisdiction; eleven votes to four on the unlawful-presence finding and on the obligation to bring it to an end; fourteen votes to one on ceasing new settlement activity and on reparation; twelve votes to three on the duties of other states and of international organizations. Vice-President Sebutinde voted against subparagraphs 2 through 9 and appended a dissenting opinion. Judges Tomka, Abraham and Aurescu voted against subparagraphs 3 and 4, and Judges Abraham and Aurescu also against 7, 8 and 9.

Two distinctions in the opinion are worth carrying. It treats status and legality as separate questions, so “occupied” and “unlawfully occupied” are not one finding, and the second of the two commanded the smallest majority. And at paragraph 278, reasoning from its 1971 Namibia opinion, it states a duty to distinguish, in dealings with Israel, “between the territory of the State of Israel and the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.” The court that made the unlawfulness finding is asking states to keep the state and the territory apart.

Does annexation remove territory from the occupied category?

Annexation changes what a register counts, and Israel’s register counts East Jerusalem inside Israel. The Central Bureau of Statistics reported for Jerusalem Day 2024 that the city’s residents passed one million at the end of 2023, 60.5% of them Jews and Others and 39.5% Arabs, with the neighbourhoods annexed after 1967 inside that single municipal population.

Enacted Israeli law says the same thing in one clause. Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, adopted in 2018, states at clause 3: “The complete and united Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.” Fifteen petitions against that Basic Law were dismissed by an eleven-justice panel of the Supreme Court on 8 July 2021 in HCJ 5555/18, which upheld it while holding that the Knesset as constituent authority is “not all powerful.”

The counting convention arrived in stages, and it is documented. In a 2020 review for POMEPS, Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler and Lihi Ben Shitrit trace how the Bureau’s Yearbook moved East Jerusalem into the general population count for Israel proper in the 1968 edition, folded settlers into Israel’s total by a 1970 footnote as “Israeli residents in the Administrated Territories,” counted settlement localities inside the total number of Israeli localities by 1983, and removed the separate territories chapter in 1997. The authors call this a normalization of settlements, which is their analytic framing rather than the Bureau’s. They also record the reverse case: the Green-Line-straddling locality of Shani Livne is placed by the Bureau in Israel’s South District and counted by other trackers as a settlement.

There is a treaty rule pointing the other way, and it comes with its own recorded limits. Article 11 of the 1933 Convention on Rights and Duties of States commits its parties “not to recognize territorial acquisitions or special advantages which have been obtained by force.” Nineteen American republics signed it, no European, African or Asian state is a party, and the delegates of Brazil and Peru recorded on Article 11 “That they accept the doctrine in principle but that they do not consider it codifiable.”

Does the 2025 ceasefire plan change Gaza’s legal status?

A new authority now exists over Gaza, with a fixed end date. The Security Council adopted resolution 2803 at its 10046th meeting on 17 November 2025 by thirteen votes to none, with two abstentions, establishing a Board of Peace “as a transitional administration with international legal personality.”

China and the Russian Federation abstained, per the verbatim record of that meeting. Operative paragraph 1 endorses the Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict of 29 September 2025, carried in full as Annex 1. Operative paragraph 7 authorises a temporary International Stabilization Force to deploy under unified command, to “use all necessary measures to carry out its mandate,” and to ensure “the process of demilitarizing the Gaza Strip.” Operative paragraph 8 keeps both the Board and the authorised presences in place “until Dec. 31, 2027, subject to further action by the Council.” Operative paragraph 10 requires one written progress report to the Council every six months.

One report has been filed under paragraph 10. In S/2026/418 of 15 May 2026, transmitted by the Permanent Representative of the United States, the Board wrote that “violations continue to occur on a near daily basis, some of which are serious,” and gave no total, no rate and no attribution for them. The same report records at paragraph 37 that the Stabilization Force had not yet deployed: “Preparations for deployment are well advanced,” with founding contributors signing on 19 February 2026 and a pre-deployment site survey completed in late April 2026.

The resolution created governance machinery and a deadline. It does not use the word “violation” anywhere in its operative paragraphs or its annex.

Who is counted living in the territory each register calls occupied?

The two statistical bureaus count the same residents into different national totals. The Israel Central Bureau of Statistics reported for September 2025 a population of about 10.148 million, roughly 7.758 million Jews and others and 2.130 million Arabs, and that total includes East Jerusalem residents and West Bank settlers.

Three cautions attach to that figure. The two named groups sum to 9.888 million, not to 10.148 million, because the Bureau also counts roughly 260,000 foreign residents in the total but outside both groups; the published shares of 78.5% and 21.5% belong to the 9.888 million base. Against the full total the same counts are 76.4% and 21.0%. And the scope choice is itself the subject here: the Bureau places inside Israel’s total people whom other registers place outside it.

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics counts on a different base. Its 2017 census, the third it has conducted and the most recent, enumerated 4,780,978 residents of the West Bank and Gaza on a reference date of 1 December 2017, and could not directly enumerate East Jerusalem, where administrative estimates were used. Every later total in the series is projected off that count.

The gap is old and has been argued over in detail. In 2006 a Begin-Sadat Center report calculated 2.49 million rather than the 3.83 million the Palestinian bureau reported for mid-2004, a difference of 1.34 million, itemising 210,000 East Jerusalem Arabs it held were double-counted in Israel’s own survey. Sergio DellaPergola, building a Palestinian base from Israeli rather than Palestinian data in a paired 2005 brief, still reached about 3.4 million. In a 2013 peer-reviewed audit in The Middle East Journal, Ian Lustick concluded that the campaign rested on “complex but systematic manipulation of data,” and documented that it was tied to proposals to annex 60% or more of the West Bank.

That last point is the one the counting question turns on. The registers are not neutral instruments recording a settled geography; each encodes a claim about where the line runs, and both bureaus publish East Jerusalem residents into their own totals.

Does the term describe the State of Israel itself?

No register or instrument reviewed here predicates the word of the state. The Provisional Government of Israel declared on 14 May 1948 “THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ-ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL,” and the 1933 Montevideo Convention sets out four qualifications of statehood: “a permanent population; a defined territory; government; and capacity to enter into relations with the other states.”

Nothing in that treaty makes occupation a disqualifier, and nothing in it provides a body to apply the test. Article 3 runs the other way: “The political existence of the state is independent of recognition by the other states.” Article 6 adds that recognition “is unconditional and irrevocable.”

The legal usage runs the other way too. Rubin’s 2009 reference entry is organised by territory. The 1995 Interim Agreement carves jurisdiction by area and by person. The 1967 military order names an area and a date. The 2024 advisory opinion, at paragraph 278, asks states to distinguish between “the territory of the State of Israel and the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967,” which only makes sense if the two are separable in the first place.

Popular usage does something different, and it is measurable. The naming of Israel’s army as the “Israeli Occupation Forces” shifts the predicate from a territory held to the institution itself, and that shift is the subject of a separate Institute report on the Israeli Occupation Forces naming. The distinction is not a quibble about vocabulary. A statement about territory can be tested against a map, a military order and a jurisdiction clause. A statement about a state cannot be tested against any of them, because no instrument in this record makes a state the unit of the claim.

So the question as typed has two answers depending on which usage is meant, and the two do not converge. In the legal register the word designates places, dated, each with its own instruments and its own disputes. In the political register it designates a country.

Methodology and limitations

This report draws on four kinds of source, each labelled in the text: enacted instruments and treaty texts; court judgments of Israel’s own Supreme Court; official records published by Israeli government bodies and by the Palestinian and Israeli statistical bureaus; and one advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, reported by its recorded votes rather than adopted as a finding.

The International Court of Justice opinion of 19 July 2024 is advisory, arose on a General Assembly request, and binds no one. It is reported here by what it states and by how its bench divided across nine separately voted subparagraphs carrying four different majorities, the narrowest being eleven votes to four. Its conclusions are not carried as findings of this report.

Several figures are a party’s own count of its own conduct and are marked as such: COGAT’s truck-level entry record and its statement about the March to May 2025 period; the Board of Peace report of 15 May 2026, written by the transitional administration the resolution created and transmitted by one of the four guarantors; and the permit quotas in the February 2022 policy document, which are ceilings authorised rather than permits issued or people who crossed.

Where the literature disagrees, both poles are named. The Levy Commission of 2012 and the Supreme Court’s 1979 Elon Moreh judgment reach opposite conclusions about whether the classical law of occupation applies to the West Bank, and both are Israeli records: one a report commissioned by the Prime Minister and never adopted as government policy, the other a unanimous holding of five justices. On the population dispute, the Begin-Sadat report of 2006 is a think-tank estimate led by non-demographers, not peer-reviewed, and its central claim is contested by Sergio DellaPergola and audited critically by Ian Lustick in a peer-reviewed journal in 2013.

Limits on the underlying records are stated where they bite. Rubin’s reference entry was last updated in October 2009 and is silent on everything since. Military Order 59 has been amended nine times by the issuing authority’s own index, so the 1967 text is not the text in force. The Interim Agreement carries no territorial percentage, so any Area C share comes from another body. The Palestinian bureau’s last full census was in 2017 and could not directly enumerate East Jerusalem. The Israeli bureau’s published group shares belong to a 9.888 million base rather than to its 10.148 million total. The Levy Report’s only full English text was produced by an organisation that made submissions to the commission. No official English text of Military Order 59 exists on any state host, and the Hebrew governs.

Conclusion

The question was whether one word still portrays a country after everything that has happened. On the records read here, the word is not a portrait of a country at all. It is an attachment to named ground: a 1967 order over a defined area, a 1995 agreement that draws Areas A, B and C on an attached map and carves out Jerusalem, settlements and Israelis by name, a reference work that has chapters on places rather than on a state, and a court asking others to keep the state and the territory apart.

What the developments changed is not the designation but what sits on top of it. Israel’s Supreme Court has reasoned inside occupation law since 1979 and annulled orders under it in 2011 and 2014; a commission appointed by the Prime Minister concluded in 2012 that the classical law does not apply, and no government adopted that conclusion. The Security Council built a transitional administration over Gaza in November 2025 with a stated end date of 31 December 2027, and seven months later the force meant to monitor the ceasefire had not deployed. Israel’s statistical yearbook absorbed East Jerusalem into Israel’s count in 1968 and dropped its separate territories chapter in 1997, while the Palestinian census counts many of the same residents and cannot directly enumerate them. Each of these is a different kind of record, and none of them moves the noun.

The gap the record leaves open is between two grammars. One predicates the word of parcels, and can be checked against a map, a military order, a jurisdiction clause and a population register. The other predicates it of a state, and matches no instrument in this file. When a word carries two grammars at once, the argument people think they are having about facts on the ground is partly an argument about which grammar is being used, and neither side announces it. Is the slide from the first to the second one of the inputs that turns a territorial dispute into a claim about a people?

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do court judgments and a government commission reach opposite conclusions in the same country?

They apply different bodies of law to different questions. In HCJ 390/79 the Supreme Court held the 1907 Hague Regulations bind the military administration as customary international law, which Israel’s courts can apply, while expressly declining to decide the Fourth Geneva Convention question because treaty law “is not binding law in an Israeli Court.” The 2012 Levy Commission addressed the broader characterisation and concluded the classical law does not fit Israel’s decades-long presence.

Does the 2024 World Court opinion oblige anyone to do anything?

It is advisory. It arose on a General Assembly request of 30 December 2022, it is not a judgment in a contentious case, and it binds no state. What it does carry is a recorded division: nine separately voted subparagraphs, with the unlawful-presence finding passing eleven votes to four and four justices dissenting from it.

How much of the West Bank is Area C?

The signed agreement does not say. The 1995 Interim Agreement defines Areas A and B by coloured lines on an attached map and defines Area C as whatever is left, and the words “per cent” appear once in the whole main Agreement, in a clause about appointments. Every circulating share, including the familiar 60%, comes from a later measurement by some other body and belongs to whoever measured it.

Which Israeli register counts East Jerusalem residents?

Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counts them inside Jerusalem’s single municipal population, which passed one million at the end of 2023 at 60.5% Jews and Others and 39.5% Arabs. The Palestinian census of 2017 also covers East Jerusalem, but could not enumerate it directly and used administrative estimates.

What did the 2005 Gaza withdrawal not change?

The economic framework signed in 1994 and 1995 remained. The Paris Protocol binds both sides to a common import policy and a six-day revenue clearance, and the 1995 Supplement added a 3% Israeli deduction from each transfer. Water arrangements for Gaza were expressly left “unchanged” by Article 40, paragraph 25 of the Interim Agreement, with settlement water systems staying under Mekoroth.

Does resolution 2803 define what counts as a ceasefire violation?

No. The word “violation” appears nowhere in the resolution’s operative paragraphs or in the annexed Plan. The resolution requires the Board of Peace to file a written progress report every six months, and the first such report, of 15 May 2026, described violations as occurring “on a near daily basis” without publishing a total, a rate or an attribution.

Is there an official English text of the military orders?

Not for Military Order 59. The Collection of Proclamations, Orders and Appointments prints each order in Hebrew and Arabic on facing halves of the page and in no third language, and the issuing authority’s index gives only a Hebrew and an Arabic title. Every English wording of that order in circulation is an unofficial translation.

Does international law say a state cannot exist if it holds occupied territory?

The 1933 Convention on Rights and Duties of States lists four qualifications for statehood and none of them concerns occupation. It also names no body to apply the test, states at Article 3 that political existence “is independent of recognition by the other states,” and was signed by nineteen American republics only.

Sources

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