🇮🇱🇵🇸 How Israel made it impossible for most Palestinians in Gaza to reclaim their properties

A collateral casualty of Israel indiscriminate carpet bombing of the settlements in Gaza are the property deeds of millions of Gazans who got burned or buried under the rubble

Retrieving these deeds is vital for Palestinians to preserve their properties and rights to their lands as Israel and U.S. president Donald Trump Board of Peace plan to redraw the administrative makeup of Gaza and rebuild it with no regard for the previous land owners.

Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has gone on record, previously, lamenting the lack of interest of European countries to take in Palestinians from Gaza and clear the land for his real-estate companies to build luxury resorts and other facilities. Kushner is a leading figure in Trump's Board of Peace.

The IDF also wants to keep all the bases it has built in Gaza on top of the ruined neighbourhoods.

A US military engineering map used at the CMCC in late 2025 seen by the FT showed a “UAE Temporary Emirates Housing Complex” planned on an area marked as public land. “US Planned Community Area” covered public land, private land and unlabelled land. Both areas were marked as “Rafah Clearance Zone”. 

Such claims are driving Palestinian legal aid attorneys on a mission to prove to whom the land belongs. They work with local organisations, aid groups and as independent lawyers, using standards of proof agreed by an international working group.

With nearly all of Gaza’s physical archives having been destroyed, the retrieval effort has concentrated on the enclave’s many bureaucracies that digitised records before the war.

🔗 https://archive.ph/jGJZX