effectively making it off-limits to Palestinians. The majority of these closed zones are located in the Jordan Valley and the South Hebron Hills. In MasaferYatta, the Israeli military designated in the 1980s about 30,000 dunums of lands, engulfing 12 Palestinian villages,65 to supposedly serve as a base for Firing Zone 918.66 Between 1968 and 1979, 47,000 dunums of private land in the West Bank seized for military needs,67 were in fact used to implant a settler colonial population,68 in clear violation of international humanitarian law (IHL), which prohibits all form of implantation of the occupying power’s citizens into the territory it occupies.69 To give itself a pretense of legality, Israel distinguishes between settlements and outposts, only prohibiting the latter in its domestic legislation. However, Israel then regularly regularizes such outposts, transforming them from domestically illegal settlements into legal settlements (while both remain a violation of international law). Despite being cancelled in 2020,70 the ‘Regularization Law’ of 2017 retroactively legalized around 4,000 housing units in 55 colonial outposts built on private land in the West Bank, effectively allowing the illegal expropriation of Palestinian land.71 This allows Israel to actually implement Former Prime Minister Golda 65 RHR and Breaking The Silence, Info-sheet: The 12 Villages of Firing Zone 918 in the South Hebron Hills, 2012, Accessed 15 February 2022, Available at https://law.acri.org.il/ en/2016/02/21/firing-zone-918-infosheet/ 66 Firing Zone 918: Ahmad ’Issa Abu ’Aram Et Al V. Commander of IDF Forces in Judea and Samaria. 67 BADIL, Israeli Land Grab and Forced Population Transfer of Palestinians, 34 68 BADIL, Israeli Annexation: The Case of Etzion Colonial Bloc, 2019, 32, Available at https://www.badil.org/cached_uploads/view/2021/04/20/etzionblocisraeliannexation-1618907810.pdf 69 Convention (IV) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, Geneva, 12 August 1949, Article 49. 70 The Israeli Supreme Court decided to cancel the “Settlements Regularization Law for Judea and Samaria [the West Bank]”, finding that the law disproportionately violates the rights of Palestinians to property, equality and dignity. See Adalah: https://www. adalah.org/en/content/view/10035. 71 BADIL, “Israel’s ‘Regularization Law’ is an act of legalization of its colonization policies”, 10 February 2017, Accessed 15 February 2022, Available at: https://www. badil.org/press-releases/817.html. 17