Courtesy of BADIL Resource Center for
Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights
Reparations for the Palestinian people are inseparable from the global struggle for decolonization. As the Israeli regime is predicated on the systematic erasure of the Palestinian people through genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and settler-colonial domination, meaningful reparations require a three-tiered, rights-based process of decolonization across historic Palestine: dismantling the Israeli colonial-apartheid regime, reversing the harms it has produced through the restoration of Palestinian rights – especially self-determination and return – and building a political order grounded in justice, reconciliation, and human rights for all. Decolonization is not merely the cessation of domination, but rather the undoing of its material and structural consequences, with reparations serving as the mechanism through which this is realized.
International law affirms the Palestinian rights to return, restitution, and compensation; it includes guarantees of non-repetition and states’ obligations to prevent and address international crimes. Yet these rights have been denied through political obstruction, structural protections for the Israeli regime, and third-state complicity in its crimes. The denial of reparations mirrors broader patterns worldwide – from South Africa to Guatemala to the Caribbean – where owed reparations are resisted by colonial powers because they challenge impunity and colonial interests.
International law provides a clear and binding framework for Palestinian reparations. United Nations General Assembly Resolution (UNGA) 194, alongside international customary law, refugee law, criminal law, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the International Law Commission’s Draft Articles on State Responsibility collectively affirm the individual and collective rights of Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) to reparations. They furthermore confirm the corresponding obligations of states to provide reparation for internationally wrongful acts. Reparation encompasses four interdependent elements: voluntary return to original homes, restitution of property and rights, compensation for material and nonmaterial harm, and guarantees of non-repetition, including satisfaction.
The persistent denial of the Palestinian people’s inalienable rights has been produced and sustained by Israeli crimes (the ongoing Nakba) that have been enabled by states’ inaction and complicity.
In the Palestinian context, these rights extend to descendants of those displaced in 1948 and thereafter. While specific to refugees and IDPs – who constitute 66 percent of the Palestinian people – they are integral to the struggle for self-determination, forming the basis through which the Palestinian people can freely shape their political, social, and economic future. Together, return, restitution, and redress constitute not only a legal standard but the material and political foundation for sovereignty, collective life, and decolonial justice.
Israeli impunity and crimes have been sustained over the past 78 years through two mutually reinforcing dynamics: the failure of third states to enforce international law and their active complicity. Together, these have enabled the pillars of the Israeli regime – forced displacement and transfer, colonization, and apartheid – to persist, escalate, and expand geographically. In the absence of accountability, Israeli crimes have intensified into genocide, and mass destruction, ongoing dispossession, and forced displacement have been normalized while justice and reparations are being obstructed.
States’ evasion of legal obligations has internationalized and normalized Palestinian displacement and dispossession. The 1948 Nakba established this paradigm: Over 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced, more than 500 villages destroyed or depopulated, and vast areas of land stolen by force. Israeli apartheid laws, including the Absentee Property Law (1950) and the Prevention of Infiltration Law (1954), codified this process by reclassifying Palestinian land as Israeli “state” property and criminalizing return. As a result, 78 percent of historic Palestine came under Israeli control and was subsequently colonized.3
Efforts to uphold Palestinian rights were obstructed from the outset. UN-appointed mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in his progress reports from 1947 affirmed that return and restitution were preconditions for peace, later formalized in UNGA Resolution 194.4 His assassination by a Zionist gang in September 1948 – immediately after submitting his report that insisted on Palestinian return – was followed by further displacement and massacres that included those at al-Safsaf and al-Dawaymeh in October 1948.5 This established an early precedent of international acquiescence that entrenched Israeli impunity.
The absence of accountability, including reparations, has enabled successive waves of Palestinian displacement. Following the 1967 Six-Day War, the Israeli regime expanded its control over the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Gaza, forcibly displacing approximately 450,000 Palestinians, some already expelled during the Nakba. During the First Intifada (1987 to 1993), grassroots resistance to Israeli colonization and apartheid was quelled through international intervention in the form of the Oslo Accords (1993 to 1995), which entrenched territorial fragmentation and displacement, deferred core Palestinian rights, and deepened economic dependency on the Israeli regime.6
International impunity has enabled a regional expansion of Israeli crimes beyond Palestine, including aggressions in Lebanon, Syria, Qatar, Yemen, and most recently Iran. Without accountability, these acts illustrate how the denial of Palestinian rights underpins wider impunity and displacement, a pattern and ideology that is actively consolidated through the Israeli Decisive Plan (2022).7 This plan advances territorial expansion “from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates,” the so-called “Greater Israel” project, linking regional aggression directly to Israeli colonial objectives.
Even though legal frameworks govern reparations, the Israeli regime’s impunity and states’ systematic inaction and complicity – from 1948 to the Oslo Accords and via the Decisive Plan,1 and United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 28032 – have all continuously denied the Palestinian people their rights to self-determination and reparations.
Within Palestine, fragmentation through land confiscation, movement restrictions, and segregated infrastructure have produced a system of enclaves modeled on the apartheid South African bantustan structure.8 This is intensifying through colony expansion (as 34 new colonies in the West Bank have been formalized in April 2026), forced displacement (particularly of Palestinian Bedouin communities across Palestine, refugees from the camps in the northern West Bank, and Palestinian residents of Silwad and other parts of Jerusalem), and apartheid governance (most recently reflected in the Knesset’s March 2026 adoption of an apartheid death penalty that targets Palestinian political prisoners and resistance fighters).
Since 2008, repeated Israeli attacks on Gaza have devastated homes, hospitals, schools, and essential infrastructure, while ongoing genocide, mass destruction, blockade, and the weaponization of aid have profoundly eroded Palestinian life.9 Despite this scale of destruction, no meaningful accountability or reparations have been realized. Instead, the Israeli regime’s refusal to withdraw and the imposition of the “yellow line” have created an enclave within an enclave, further consolidating domination while denying cumulative reparations. In the context of the prolonged blockade and repeated closure of the Rafah Crossing, urgent, rights-based recovery is essential for Palestinians to rebuild from genocide and cumulative harm and to prevent further cycles of displacement and dispossession.
Reconstruction in Gaza is not merely urgent – it is a legal and moral imperative. But if it is not grounded in genuine reparations, it entrenches the structures of colonialism and apartheid it must dismantle and remedy. The responsibility of reparations is unequivocal: The Israeli regime, as the perpetrator of genocide and international crimes, bears the primary legal and financial liability.
Resolution 2803 aims to use Gaza’s reconstruction outside a reparative framework to further entrench Israeli colonial domination with US backing.
However, UNSC 2803, incorporating Trump’s “Twenty-Point Plan,” further advances the Israeli regime’s colonial aims through the creation of a so-called Board of Peace (BoP).10 This BoP – which paradoxically includes the Israeli regime itself – coordinates billion-dollar “reconstruction” pledges from third states, displacing legal responsibility and reframing reparations as donor-driven reconstruction.11 In doing so, it consolidates control in external actors, sidelines Palestinians, and erodes their rights to self-determination and reparations, denying meaningful authority over governance, land, and resources while reproducing colonial domination under the guise of “reconstruction.”
Palestinians are thus compelled to rebuild without control over the process, while reconstruction is made conditional on their subservience and the disarmament of resistance – further entrenching the denial of self-determination. Despite being the perpetrator of genocide and a whole range of other international crimes, the Israeli regime is both effectively absolved from any responsibility and perversely positioned as a recipient of reparations instead. This was asserted by US Ambassador to the Israeli regime, Mike Huckabee, when he stated that the regime should not pay “a single penny” and instead claimed that the Israeli regime should receive reparations.12
Decolonial reparations require comprehensive sanctions, enforced accountability, and structural transformation.
Operating beyond meaningful multilateral scrutiny, the BoP centralizes political coordination and financial flows while undermining established international legal frameworks. As President Donald Trump stated, “The Board of Peace is going to almost be looking over the United Nations and making sure it runs properly.”13 This signals a deliberate effort to supplant legitimate international authority and exclude institutions such as UNRWA. In effect, Gaza’s reconstruction is transformed into a vehicle for neocolonial profit and disaster capitalism,14 all while shielding the Israeli regime from accountability.
States retain binding obligations to uphold the full spectrum of Palestinian rights, including the right of return – obligations that rise from their role in creating the conditions of displacement through the UN Partition Plan (1947) and their subsequent failure to prevent, halt or remedy the resulting waves of displacement. As such, UNCCP and UNRWA were established as mechanisms for states to fulfill their obligations and ensure the fulfillment of Palestinian rights.
Established under UNGA Resolution 194, the UNCCP was tasked with realizing return, restitution, and compensation for Palestinian refugees and IDPs. However, it became effectively defunct by the late 1950s amid political obstruction and the absence of enforcement. UNRWA, created in 1949 under UNGA Resolution 302, was intended to provide humanitarian assistance “without prejudice to the right of return,” operating alongside the UNCCP as part of a broader international protection framework.15 With UNCCP’s incapacity, a structural vacuum emerged in relation to return, restitution, and compensation. UNRWA serves as the last institutional embodiment of the right of return through its registries, institutional continuity, and preservation of evidentiary records of displacement.
Far from being solely a humanitarian agency, UNRWA functions as an embedded pillar of Palestinian reparative infrastructure, as its mandate is explicitly linked to Paragraph 11 of UNGA 194, situating its work within the rights of return, restitution, and compensation. Through its operations and refugee registries, UNRWA preserves the legal and administrative foundations of Palestinian claims – while its predominantly Palestinian workforce and deep social embeddedness ensure sustained institutional memory of displacement and the practical continuity necessary for reparative processes.
For this reason, UNRWA has been persistently targeted since its inception through political delegitimization, defunding, and obstruction by the Israeli regime, with support from the United States, effectively eroding the international protection mechanisms for Palestinian refugees and IDPs.
Palestinian liberation can only be achieved by all-encompassing decolonization; the uprooting of the root causes of the Ongoing Nakba – Israeli apartheid, colonization and forced displacement – and the dismantling of the political, socioeconomic, legal, and ideological elements of the Israeli colonial-apartheid regime.
UNCCP and UNRWA must remain institutional foundations of Palestinian return and reparations. Safeguarding UNRWA’s mandate is essential to preserving the only functioning bridge between humanitarian provision and reparative justice for the Palestinian people. Its exclusion from reconstruction frameworks detaches recovery from accountability, entrenching the conditions through which dispossession persists, rather than enabling a rights-based process of return, restitution, and redress.
Reparations must not be reduced to reconstruction or financial compensation, dispensed as gestures of goodwill; they are binding obligations that necessarily encompass reconstruction as one of their core components, alongside other concrete and enforceable forms of justice. These include the return of displaced Palestinians to their original homes and lands across historic Palestine under conditions of safety, dignity, and full legal guarantee; restitution of land, housing, and stolen or destroyed property since the beginning of the British Mandate, with compensation where restitution is impossible; and comprehensive redress for physical, material, and psychological harm.
Reparations cannot simply restore the pre-1947 status quo. The cumulative nature of genocide and other Israeli crimes makes temporal reversals insufficient. A reparatory decolonial process must be transformative, advancing substantive equality, social and economic justice, security, and collective dignity. There are no predetermined limitations on the political, social, or economic futurities that will emerge from decolonization; the scope and imagination of such futures remain wholly with the Palestinian people.
Reparations for the Palestinian people must be understood as a decolonial, rights-based process that is rooted in return, restitution, and accountability. Israeli impunity, sustained through international complicity, has perpetuated the Ongoing Nakba from 1948 to the present, while reframing reconstruction efforts, particularly in Gaza, as mechanisms that displace legal responsibility and entrench colonial control.
At its core, this demands that Palestinians themselves shape and lead the design and implementation of reparations, from governance to resource distribution and the reconfiguration of land and property relations. These processes must be transparent, rights-based, and supported by independent international mechanisms that enforce legal obligations, with the Israeli regime, as the primary obligor, and complicit states bearing secondary responsibility. No externally imposed colonial structures – whether past or present – can be permitted to define or limit the exercise of Palestinian rights. The weakening or dismantling of UNRWA risks diverting international assistance into modes of unlawful control, thereby undermining accountability and obstructing the realization of reparative justice.
While the precise contours of a decolonized Palestine will ultimately be determined by the Palestinian people, any lawful outcome must be grounded in the principles of accountability, restoration, sovereignty, and justice. Given the complicity of colonial states in sustaining the Israeli colonial-apartheid regime, enforcement cannot be presumed to arise from existing power structures.
The realization of reparations and decolonization requires sustained collective direct action, including organized resistance, transnational solidarity, and the imposition of comprehensive political and economic sanctions and arms embargoes to end Israeli impunity. By centering the Palestinian people’s inalienable rights to self-determination and return, a genuinely reparative decolonial process can be actualized – one that restores rights, reclaims land and sovereignty, and brings an end to almost eight decades of ongoing Israeli crimes.
Colonial powers become the most aggressive when their domination begins to wane; in these moments of intensification, their foundations are revealed as increasingly weak. Through resolute and sustained collective action, colonial-apartheid structures can be dismantled, accountability enforced, and justice made unavoidable – bringing an end to the Ongoing Nakba of the Palestinian people.
Return is our right and our will.
1 BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights,The Decisive Plan: The Israeli Regime’s Blueprint for Colonial Expansion and Palestinian Subjugation, October 2025).
2 The United Nations in this controversial resolution accepted Trump’s so-called Board of Peace for the reconstruction of Gaza that paradoxically includes the Israeli regime. See also endnote 10.
3 Nur Masalha, “Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of Transfer in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948,” Journal of Palestine Studies 25(2), Winter 1996: 20–37.
4 Shaira Vadasaria, “1948 to 1951: The Racial Politics of Humanitarianism and Return in Palestine” Oñati Socio-Legal Series 10(6), 2020: 1242–1269.
5 Sana Hammoudi, “Al-Dawayima, 29 October 1948: A Most Brutal Massacre Long Kept Under Wraps” in Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question, Institute for Palestine Studies, accessed April 11, 2026; and Nafez Nazzal, The Palestinian Exodus from Galilee, 1948, Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1978.
6 BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights,Palestinian Youth Perspectives on the Oslo Peace Process: Successes, Failures and AlternativesWorking Paper No. 27, August 2021.
7 BADIL, The Decisive Plan.
8 BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights,The Israeli Apartheid Spatial Regime: Fragmentation and Enclavement of Palestine Working Paper no. 33, March 30, 2026.
9 Al Jazeera, “Timeline: Israel’s Attacks on Gaza Since 2005” Al Jazeera, August 7, 2022.
10 United Nations Security Council, Resolution 2803 (2025), adopted by the Security Council at its 10046th meeting, 17 November 2025. S/RES/2803 (2025)
11 Zaha Hassan and Charles H. Johnson, “The Board of Peace and Funding for Gaza Reconstruction: On Whose Account? ,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, March 16, 2026.
12 Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson), “The Mike Huckabee interview, and the truth about America’s deeply unhealthy relationship with Israel ” X (formerly Twitter), February 22, 2026.
13 Nick Turse, “ Trump’s ‘Orwellian’ Board of Peace Consists Entirely of Human Rights Abusers” The Intercept, March 2, 2026.
14 Matan Kaminer, “Gaza and the Economy of Genocide,” Jacobin, October 1, 2025.
15 BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights,Engineered Collapse: The United Nations’ Strategic Assessment of UNRWA and Palestinian Refugee Rights Position Paper, August 2025.
BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights is an independent human rights organization that forwards decolonial realities by documenting the Israeli regime’s ongoing crimes, particularly forcible transfer, colonization, apartheid, and genocide. We work to promote and advance the Palestinian people’s rights through legal and international advocacy, research, documentation, and community engagement to bring about accountability and justice.
