Prolonged occupation under international humanitarian law

Abstract

At a time when international law has become interpreted by reliance on the policy of powerful States, the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories was and still is the longest occupation in history. Making some convinced and believed that public international law has become impractical, hopeless and pointless at such times. One of these dangerous interpretations is justifying the existence of the Israeli occupation for a long period of time as a “prolonged occupation”, while the temporariness of an occupation is one of the criteria of what makes it legal. Accordingly, the “prolonged occupation” argument raises two main legal issues. The first is the application of international humanitarian law since its interpretation implies that occupation is for a short period of time. And the second issue is that occupation is based on the idea of preserving the status of the occupied population, however, if the occupation has no end in sight, it would certainly change the status of the occupied population because preservation will lead the population to a legal and political limbo. For this, we dedicate this article to cover these issues.