'You're a foreigner, you don't have to pay purchase taxes': Al Jazeera exposes Israeli agents marketing occupied land to Westerners

Undercover reporting has pulled back the curtain on how Israeli real estate agents aggressively market properties in occupied Palestinian territory to Western buyers, exposing a well-organized, transnational sales operation whose pitches reportedly include tax exemptions and other incentives not typically available to Israeli buyers themselves.

A network spanning seven countries
An open-source investigation traced a web of Israeli companies and individuals marketing homes built in West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements to buyers abroad, finding these commercial operations intersect directly with government institutions and official efforts to attract Jewish immigrants to the occupied territories.

The network has staged marketing events in at least seven countries, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Australia, Panama and Mexico, with the most recent gathering, the "Great Israeli Real Estate Event," held in London in mid-June, continuing a pattern of similar activity stretching back to the 1990s.

Companies identified include Harei Zahav, which advertises property in Negohot, an illegal settlement in the southern Hebron Hills, and Noam Homes, which markets listings across multiple West Bank settlements including Efrat, Ma'ale Adumim and Givat Ze'ev to buyers throughout North America, Europe and Australia.

Al Jazeera's investigation: no mention of Palestinians

Al Jazeera's own coverage of the London fair offers a striking inside account. An activist from the Jewish Anti-Zionist Action group, who accessed the event on condition of anonymity, told the broadcaster that agents made no mention of Palestinians at all throughout the fair, instead marketing settlement properties as "Anglo-communities," self-contained enclaves where English-speaking buyers from the United States, the UK and South Africa could relocate.

She described recurring sales pitch in which agents framed the war on Gaza as a buying opportunity, telling prospective clients that falling prices made it a good time to purchase, sometimes with an offered discount. The event was heavily protected, including by plainclothes security fitted with body cameras, and had a tightly controlled, secretive atmosphere, with its exact location withheld from the public until the last moment.

Political backlash in London
The event drew direct political intervention. London Mayor Sadiq Khan said he raised it with the Metropolitan Police, who confirmed any allegations of unlawful property sales would be assessed for possible investigation. Green Party leader Zack Polanski formally wrote to Khan calling for a police probe, while Amnesty International UK's crisis response campaign manager, Kristyan Benedict, said it was unthinkable that Britain would allow an event openly promoting settlement expansion at a time of accelerating annexation measures and state-backed settler violence.

UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper told Parliament the government was pursuing the matter, and a Foreign Office spokesperson reaffirmed that Israeli settlements are illegal under international law. The event was organized by My Home in Israel, a real estate agency built specifically around attracting overseas clients to Israeli and settlement properties.

Part of a wider commercial infrastructure

The property-marketing push is not an isolated phenomenon. A separate Al Jazeera investigation found at least 52 paid Facebook advertisements from Israeli real estate companies promoting settlement property sales to buyers in Israel, the UK and the United States, alongside other adverts calling for the demolition of Palestinian homes and schools, raising questions about Meta's own compliance with international law.

Separately, a United Nations database has identified 158 companies, most in construction, real estate, mining and quarrying, tied to Israel's settlement enterprise in the West Bank, with UN human rights chief Volker Turk stressing that businesses operating in conflict contexts carry a due diligence responsibility to ensure their activities do not contribute to human rights abuses.

Why this matters beyond the real estate pages

The Fourth Geneva Convention's Article 49 prohibits an occupying power from transferring its own civilian population into occupied territory, the legal basis for the international consensus that Israeli settlements are illegal, even as more than 700,000 settlers, roughly 10 percent of Israel's population, now live across 150 settlements and 128 outposts in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

For African and Muslim-majority audiences following the Palestinian question, these investigations underscore how deeply international real estate capital, social media advertising, and tax incentives have become embedded in sustaining settlement expansion, and how difficult that architecture is proving for Western governments to meaningfully restrict even as their own officials publicly acknowledge its illegality.

Mustapha Bature Sallama.
Medical/ Science Communicator,
Private Investigator, Criminal investigation and Intelligence Analysis.

International Conflict Management and Peace Building.USIP

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