The National Court of Asylum, in eastern Paris suburb of Montreuil, on February 22, 2024. MIGUEL MEDINA / AFP
R. was born in 1983 in a refugee camp in the West Bank, a Palestinian territory occupied by the State of Israel since 1967. He arrived in France in 2021 and initially failed to obtain asylum. But on Monday, December 8, in a landmark decision, France's National Court of Asylum (CNDA) reconsidered his case and granted him refugee status.
To justify its decision, the court relied on the security situation in the West Bank and the inability of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) to fulfill its protection mandate.
According to the court, Israeli armed forces have placed the West Bank under a "state of confinement and siege." Air raids, mass arrests, expulsions and demolitions of homes have trapped nearly 2.8 million civilians in this territory of less than 6,000 square kilometers. Over 40,000 Palestinians were evacuated from refugee camps in February, without the possibility of return; nearly 1,000 civilians were killed; and more than 10,000 people were injured between October 7, 2023 – the day of the Hamas terrorist attack that triggered an Israeli counter-offensive – and the end of September 2025, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
