Following HaMoked’s petition and a 33-year bureaucratic struggle: permanent residency granted to a Palestinian man in his late forties who lived his entire life in East Jerusalem

Due to the Ministry of Interior’s (MOI) foot-dragging in handling residency status applications of children born to Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, it is not uncommon for the processing time of such applications to span years and even decades. During this time, applicants are forced to live without legal status or basic rights, in constant uncertainty that severely undermines their ability to lead a normal life. In severe displays of systemic indifference, errors made by the MOI are not corrected but rather perpetuated over the years and later used as a “reasonable” justification for rejecting additional applications

Such errors are neither isolated nor accidental. They stem from systemic failures in the MOI’s handling of status applications. For many years, the Ministry did not publish its procedures for the registration of children. In fact, until HaMoked’s petition in AP 727/06 Nofal et al. v. The Minister of the Interior (May 22, 2011), these procedures were never formally regulated. This situation, combined with the reported chaos at the Population Authority offices and the lack of physical accessibility to them, made it extremely difficult for parents to navigate the complex and frequently changing bureaucratic processes required to regularize their children’s status.

Over the years, HaMoked has handled many such cases. One of the longest and most complex is the case of A., a Jerusalem resident born in 1978 to a mother who was a resident of East Jerusalem and a father who was a resident of the West Bank. A. was born at home. His birth was not documented, and his status was never registered in Israel, the occupied territories, or anywhere else. His mother hoped to register him as a resident of Jerusalem, her birthplace, and could not have imagined that this registration process would conclude only as A. approached the age of 50.

At the time of A.’s birth, Israel implemented a policy that summarily rejected family unification applications submitted by women for their spouses. The MOI justified this policy by claiming that, in Palestinian society, women “follow their husbands,” and therefore there was no reason to grant legal status in Israel to the spouse. This discriminatory policy changed only in 1994 following a ruling by the High Court of Justice (HCJ). Two years earlier, in 1992, A.’s mother submitted an application to regularize her husband’s status through family unification and to register their shared children as permanent residents of East Jerusalem. After five years with no response, it was discovered that the application had been lost. Although the error lay with the Population Authority, the family was forced to seek legal assistance and submit a new application.

In another unfortunate error, when submitting the new application, the attorney handling the family’s case omitted the names of four of the children, including A.’s name. The omission occurred because these names were not listed on the father’s ID card, from which the names were copied into the application. The mother submitted an amended application in 2000, and after a lengthy and cumbersome process, which involved having to petition the HCJ, all of the siblings whose names had been omitted were granted permanent status, except for one: A. It is unclear from the decision why he alone was excluded. The only explanation provided by the MOI was based on the incorrect claim that A. was not mentioned in the application from 2000 and that “it is unclear where he came from.”

The family did not abandon their efforts to register him and submitted another application later that same year. However, this application marked only the beginning of a bureaucratic ordeal that lasted 24 years and included no fewer than seven inter-ministerial humanitarian committees convened to review the case, as well as countless legal proceedings. Only in 2017, following an appeal filed by HaMoked to the Supreme Court, did A. succeed in obtaining temporary residency status, which must be renewed annually, subject to security and criminal background checks.

On October 11, 2020, an application was submitted to upgrade A.’s status to permanent residency, with the aim of providing him with stability and a sense of security after more than four decades of living in Jerusalem and having a deep connection to the place. In the application, HaMoked emphasized that living with a temporary status violates human dignity and the right to belong to a place in the world and to settle there. Each year, A. was required to submit another application to renew his status through a burdensome procedure that often failed to conclude on time due to repeated delays by the authorities, leaving him at risk of detention and deportation.

Despite these arguments, the application was summarily rejected on the tenuous claim that A. had not held temporary status for a sufficient period and was therefore not eligible for an upgrade under the applicable criteria. This decision entirely ignored the fact that his initial application was submitted 28 (!) years earlier, and that the reason he had not been granted temporary status earlier was the MOI’s improper and arbitrary conduct. Since 2020, HaMoked has filed two internal appeals with the Population Authority seeking to overturn the decision. Despite dozens of reminder letters sent by HaMoked’s lawyers, no response was received from the Authority for more than two years. Only on December 26, 2023 was a decision issued on one of the appeals, rejecting it while repeating the reasoning of the original 2020 decision almost verbatim, without addressing the new arguments raised by HaMoked. In light of the MOI’s prolonged failure to issue a decision, HaMoked appealed to the court multiple times on grounds of non-response. The most recent appeal was filed on July 22, 2025.

Finally, on October 28, 2025, 33 years after the family submitted its first application, the Population Authority accepted HaMoked’s arguments and granted A. permanent residency status in Israel. This decision provides A., now 47 years old, with genuine stability in his place of residence after many years of struggle. At the same time, the fact that this decision was reached only after such an extended process, stemming from an administrative error and marked by arbitrary and unjustified decisions, highlights the systemic failures in the Population Authority’s policy toward regulating the status of Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, and the impossible reality that this policy imposes on them.