Introduction 1 Introduction “We are hoping that the Supreme Court won’t approve our displacement, although we know that for us Palestinians the Israeli High Court of Justice is a court of Injustice.” Interview with Nasser Nawaj’a in Susya, South Hebron Hills (15 February 2013) Forced Population Transfer is one of the most serious and grave breaches of human rights and international humanitarian law occurring in the occupied Palestinian territory. The forcible displacement of the Palestinian people amounts to a policy and practice of forcible transfer of Palestinians ongoing since the 1948 Nakba. According to the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities of the former Commission on Human Rights: The essence of population transfer remains a systematic coercive and deliberate…movement of population into or out of an area…with the effect or purpose of altering the demographic composition of a territory, particularly when that ideology or policy asserts the dominance of a certain group over another.1 Forced population transfer is illegal and has constituted an international crime since the Allied Resolution on German War Crimes was adopted in 1942. The strongest and most recent codification of the crime is found in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which clearly defines forcible transfer of population and settler-implantation as war crimes.2 In order to achieve the forcible transfer of the indigenous Palestinian population many Israeli laws, policies and state practices have been developed and applied. Today, this forcible displacement is carried out by Israel in the form of a 'silent' transfer policy. The policy is silent in the sense that Israel applies it while attempting to avoid international attention and regularly displaces small numbers of people. The result is discrimination against Palestinians in areas including nationality, citizenship, residency rights and land ownership.3 Little attention is given to the forced population transfer of Palestinians from 1 2 3 A.S. al-Khawasneh and R. Hatano, The Human Rights Dimensions of Population Transfer Including the Implantation of Settlers, Preliminary Report Prepared for Commission on Human Rights SubCommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, Forty-fifth Session (August 2, 1993), 27–32. Emily Haslam, ‘Unlawful Population Transfer and the Limits of International Criminal Law’, The Cambridge Law Journal 61, no. 1 (March 2002): 66–75. See Amjad Alqasis, ‘The Ongoing Nakba -The Continuous Forcible Displacement Of The Palestinian People’, Al-Majdal Quarterly Magazine of BADIL, Autumn 2012.