Weitz carried them out anyway. Virtually all of this plunder was carried out under the cover of meticulous legal procedures. A whole army of lawyers attached to the Jewish Agency, the state, the office of the chief of staff, and the Justice Ministry-together with a retinue of international “legal experts”-labored on the issue of confiscated lands. The most effective tool of this conquest was the Emergency Regulations for Absentees’ Property of December 1948, drafted by the Justice Ministry. These regulations, we are informed, “shifted the legal definition of what constituted abandoned land from the land itself to its owner: instead of declaring land to be ‘abandoned,’ people were now declared ‘absentees’ whose property could be seized by the state”. And when people were not absent, they were ‘absented’ on behalf of the state, as happened to thousands of Palestinians who remained in Israel but escaped from the fighting arena for safety, as civilians do everywhere, and subsequently found that their land officially sequestered.”132 The stated objective of the Absentee Property Law is to safeguard absentee property until the status of Palestinian refugees is resolved. However, the law, in combination with other land-related laws, confers legitimacy to illegal Israeli actions detrimental to the right to property restitution of Palestinian refugees and IDPs.133 Israel has confiscated, and continues to confiscate, refugee and IDP properties through its absentee property regulations and land laws, and has sold, and continues to sell, those properties. The privatization of these properties is not only prohibited under international law, it thwarts the right of Palestinian refugees to restitution of their lands and properties. The example that follows is a testimony of a family from Jaffa. The family shares ownership of their ‎home with Amidar, an Israeli State-owned housing company‎, that received partial ownership when a portion of the home was ‎declared absentee property and was transferred to the Development Authority. ‎The current partial control of the home by Amidar puts the property at risk of privatization. ‎ “‎ I’m now 77 years old. I never lived in any other place than Jaffa. My husband had six ‎siblings; there were seven of them altogether. In 1948 when the war 132 Salim Tamari, Records of Dispossession Review, Journal of Palestine Studies, 34, No. 3, 2004/5, available at: http://www.palestine-studies.org/jps/fulltext/41576 [accessed 7 June 2018] [hereinafter Salim Tamari, Review]. 133 See section above on International Refugee Law. Additionally see UNHCR, Housing, Land and Property Rights in Post-Conflict Societies: Proposals for a New United Nations Institutional and Policy Framework, PPLA/2005/01, March 2005, available at: http://www.refworld.org/docid/425689fa4. html [accessed 21 September 2017]. 47