page_title: West Bank
section_title: Areas annexed by Israel
hierarchical_section_title: West Bank / Geography / Political geography / Areas annexed by Israel
caption_attribution_description: English: Greater Jerusalem, May 2006. United States. Central Intelligence Agency. CREATED/PUBLISHED [Washington, D.C.]&#160;: Central Intelligence Agency, [2006] NOTES Shows settlements, refugee camps, fences, walls, etc. "Imagery base: SPOT 5 multispectral imagery acquired July 2004." Includes chart describing plans for new settlements. "803197AI (G00307) 5-06." Scale 1:40,000&#160;; universal transverse Mercator proj. (E 35006'--E 35021'/N 31054'--N 310390). MEDIUM 1 remote-sensing map&#160;: col.&#160;; 87 x 67 cm. CALL NUMBER G7504.J4G4 2006 .U5 REPOSITORY Library of Congress Geography and Map Division Washington, D.C. 20540-4650 USA DIGITAL ID g7504j ct001915 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g7504j.ct001915 Note:Image converted from jp2 -&gt; jpg
context_page_description: The West Bank is a landlocked territory near the Mediterranean coast of Western Asia, bordered by Jordan to the east and by Israel to the south, west and north. The West Bank also contains a significant section of the western Dead Sea shore.
  The "West Bank" name was given to the territory after it was captured by Jordan in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War because it sits on the west side of the Jordan river. Jordan subsequently annexed the territory in 1950 and held it until 1967 when it was occupied by Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War.
  The Oslo Accords, signed between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel, created administrative districts with varying levels of Palestinian autonomy within each area. Area C, in which Israel maintained complete civil and security control, accounts for over 60% of the territory of the West Bank.
  The West Bank, including East Jerusalem, has a land area of 5,640 km² plus a water area of 220 km², consisting of the northwest quarter of the Dead Sea. As of July 2017 it has an estimated population of 2,747,943 Palestinians, and approximately 391,000 Israeli settlers, and approximately another 201,200 Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem.
context_section_description: Through the Jerusalem Law, Israel extended its administrative control over East Jerusalem. This has often been interpreted as tantamount to an official annexation, though Ian Lustick, in reviewing the legal status of Israeli measures, has argued that no such annexation ever took place. The Palestinian residents have legal permanent residency status. Rejecting the Jerusalem Law, the UN Security Council passed UN Security Council Resolution 478, declaring that the law was "null and void". Although permanent residents are permitted, if they wish, to receive Israeli citizenship if they meet certain conditions including swearing allegiance to the State and renouncing any other citizenship, most Palestinians did not apply for Israeli citizenship for political reasons. There are various possible reasons as to why the West Bank had not been annexed to Israel after its capture in 1967. The government of Israel has not formally confirmed an official reason; however, historians and analysts have established a variety of such, most of them demographic. Among those most commonly cited have been:
  Reluctance to award its citizenship to an overwhelming number of a potentially hostile population whose allies were sworn to the destruction of Israel.
  To ultimately exchange land for peace with neighbouring states
  Fear that the population of ethnic Arabs, including Israeli citizens of Palestinian ethnicity, would outnumber the Jewish Israelis west of the Jordan River.
  The disputed legality of annexation under the Fourth Geneva Convention
  The importance of demographic concerns to some significant figures in Israel's leadership was illustrated when Avraham Burg, a former Knesset Speaker and former chair of the Jewish Agency for Israel, wrote in The Guardian in September 2003,
  "Between the Jordan and the Mediterranean there is no longer a clear Jewish majority. And so, fellow citizens, it is not possible to keep the whole thing without paying a price. We cannot keep a Palestinian majority under an Israeli boot and at the same time think ourselves the only democracy in the Middle East. There cannot be democracy without equal rights for all who live here, Arab as well as Jew. We cannot keep the territories and preserve a Jewish majority in the world's only Jewish state – not by means that are humane and moral and Jewish."
caption: Greater Jerusalem, May 2006. CIA remote sensing map showing areas considered settlements, plus refugee camps, fences, walls, etc.
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