An-Najah Staff

 The current interim and temporary stage that the Palestinian society in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) (West Bank and Gaza Strip) passes through, particularly after signing the Oslo Agreement in 1994 and the followed Israeli partial withdraws from the OPT, despite the continuous land confiscation for building Israeli settlements and by-pass roads as well as the reoccupation of most of the Palestinian cities and villages since the beginning of Alaqsa Intifata in 2000, and the resulted destruction of houses and infrastructure besides the construction of the Separation Wall along the West Bank have imposed a new situation and put various challenges in front of the Palestinian planning institutions (specially on the local level) and prevented the possibility of providing and implementing the attained physical planning.  In the light of urban and physical planning theories and literature, the physical planning process and building of planning institutions within political and administrative stability enable the state (government) to provide future vision and proposals for the spatial plenum parallel to establishing institutions and administrative bodies to manage the planning process using the available resources to achieve the attained goals and objectives. The question to be asked with regard to the Palestinian case is “How to manage the planning process in transitional (or emergent) and conditional circumstances in terms of controlling the resources and having the administrative power, without definite spatial plenum to be planned?”.