Chapter One Palestine’s Accession to International Humanitarian Law Palestine’s new status as a non-member observer state at the United Nations inevitably has legal consequences at the level of international law, particularly in regard to legal status and the resulting implications. It now can be argued that the legal status of Palestine has transformed in such a way that it presents an unprecedented challenge to the Israeli claims that the Palestinian territory is disputed land, and at the same time reaffirms previous UN resolutions recognizing that the Palestinian territory occupied by Israel in 1967 - including East Jerusalem - is the land of the Palestinian State and that the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination is inalienable46. However, this does not change the concurrent status of Palestine as a state under occupation, and it does not exempt Israel as an “occupying power” from its responsibilities towards the occupied territory. Past Israeli claims that the obligations of an occupying authority can not apply because the West Bank was not, in 1967, under the legal jurisdiction of another sovereign state are superseded by subsequent implications of Israeli High Court of Justice decisions upholding the customary nature of the Geneva Conventions.47 Related to this is the problem of assuming some degree of sovereignty over the occupied territory, where it has been pointed out that sovereignty cannot simply be transferred from a defeated sovereign state to an occupier, primarily because occupation is assumed to be fundamentally temporary.48. Regardless of Israel’s past legal reasonings, Palestine has been determined to be an occupied state according to international law, and this is supported by Article (42) of the 1907 Hague Convention, which states that “ Territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army, and the occupation extends only to the territory where such authority has been established and can be exercised.” The distinguished professor of international law, Bin Cheng, has noted that a core judicial obligation is to bind states to the law, and if it is or has been committing an illegal action, then efforts must be made to eliminate the consequences of that action and return the situation to its original state49. This can be applied to Palestinian territory as still under occupation and that the Geneva Conventions are relevant here, particularly Geneva Convention IV50, Article (2) of that document, which states: 46 www.palpress.co.uk/arabic/?action=detail&id=11839 47 See for example Hilly Moodrick-Even Khen, “Having It Both Ways: the Question of Legal Regimes in Gaza and the West Bank”, Israeli Studies, Volume 16, No. 2 (Summer 2011),p. 65, esp. fn. 62. 48 http://www.jabha-wqs.net/article.php?id=430; Wadood Fawzi Shams al-Din, “LegalStudy: International Responsibility of the Occupation and Its Tools”; from quote attributed to Francis Boyle. 49 http://www.jabha-wqs.net/article.php?id=430 50 Entitled Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in the Time of War. 27