Israeli 'Blue Line Team' Redraws Maps, Reclassifying West Bank Land Before Settlers Move In

Bilal Abu Alia can still point to where his family's olive trees stood before the bulldozers came. His family once held roughly 0.4 square kilometers, about 100 acres, of land in al-Mughayyir, northeast of Ramallah. Today they can reach only their house and a handful of trees.

The path from olive grove to military zone to "state land" runs through a unit inside Israel's Civil Administration known as the Blue Line Team. Established in 1999, the team is made up of surveyors, cartographers and legal staff who use GIS mapping to redraw the boundaries of land Israel classifies as state property, according to a report published in mid-September by the National Bureau for Defending Land and Resisting Settlements, a body affiliated with the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

The mechanism matters because of what comes after the redrawing. Once land is mapped inside Israel's "state land" category, it becomes available for allocation to settlement projects, which are illegal under international law regardless of how the underlying parcel was classified.

According to the bureau's report, the team recently re-demarcated almost 0.2 square kilometers, about 49 acres, across the northern and central West Bank, shifting the land from state-land status into areas designated for settlement activity. The report names four affected villages: Jalud, Qaryut, Turmusayya and al-Mughayyir.

Israel's Civil Administration has described Blue Line revisions as technical corrections of historic surveying errors, according to Al Jazeera's account of the Israeli position; no direct statement or document was cited. The UN, Al Jazeera reports, has said the revisions have in effect expanded the territory Israel classifies as state property. The bureau's report goes further, arguing the team has shifted from a boundary-mapping body into a tool for accelerating settlement expansion and legitimizing outposts, a characterization Al Jazeera notes is disputed.

For the Abu Alia family, the paperwork followed an incident. In August 2025, a settler was shot while encroaching on Palestinian land in al-Mughayyir. Israeli forces then ran a four-day operation in the village, and bulldozers uprooted thousands of olive trees, including on land Bilal's family had farmed.

"We were informed that we were barred from accessing this land, that it had become a military zone and then state land. We watched as the olive trees planted by my great-grandfather a century ago were bulldozed and uprooted right before our eyes, yet we were powerless to stop it," Bilal told Al Jazeera.

The army told the family the land was now a closed military zone, barred to Palestinians and settlers alike. Bilal says he soon saw a settler plowing it anyway. A complaint to the military liaison office paused the plowing for a few days; the settler then resumed, under what Bilal describes as Israeli army protection.

In December 2025, Bilal, his father and his elderly uncle went to gather wood from the uprooted trees. The land was under camera surveillance, he says. The three men were arrested and held for three days, handcuffed, blindfolded, and left on the cold ground at an army camp, according to Bilal's account.

When the family tried to formally object to the confiscation, Bilal says he was given three days to file. By then, he says, bulldozers had already started work on the site.

Al Jazeera reported that it contacted Israeli authorities for comment on the Blue Line Team's operations and the al-Mughayyir case but had not received a response as of publication.