Depends what you mean by "Palestinian." Owned by Palestinians? Sure. Some of it.
Owned by the state and entrusted to Palestinian religious organizations? Sure, some of it.
The entire territory owned by Palestinians? Hardly.
Subject to a Palestinian government? Never.
Lands could be private, waqf ('mosque'), or state. State lands were the state's or the king's.
The land registry system was weak. Very weak. No need to register deeds. No need to have a deed.
There were ways to claim king's land. That way, from the 1800s, is still the law. But it's not the words it's the interpretation, and the interpretation was different under the Turks, the Brits, the Jordanians, and the Israelis. Of course, you didn't have to register your claim, so some claims are really in dispute.
And there are all kinds of fraudulent deeds. If you're a Jew and wanted to buy land, it was illegal. So you'd use an agent. But the sale wasn't legal, whatever the deed said. You had a deed, they had a deed. Or you could sell to somebody absentee, and because of the way land was held, there were absentee owners with holdings of many thousdands of acres. They have a legal deed, they're not around; you have your old deed, you are around. You use the land, leave it to your son, he leaves it to his grandson, absentee owner comes along. Who's deed is valid? Given the poor documentation needed, a lot of deeds were just forged--the absentee owner can't defend his deed, and the forged deeds are sold. Somebody gets stuck holding the fake paper. Sometimes the deeds are sort of legitimately forged, sort of illegally back-created to reflect legitimate land claims from 50 years before that were never registered and deeded.
Then there's the little fact that the state and king's land was taken over by the Brits, then the Jordanians, then the Israelis. Along the way the Jordanians took some waqf land. Of course, the Jordanians confiscated any Jewish or Xian or even a lot of absentee Palestinian land--and gave that out to Palestinians. When the Israelis got the West Bank a lot of the Jordanian deeds were declared invalid and the Jewish ones deemed valid again.
In the US, in Europe, we still talk about "clear" title, title searches, title insurance. We have in mind little things like liens. This is why it's still such a big deal, even though for most of us it's just background noise. There's a lot of "deeming" of deeds in that little patch of land. When you see B'tselem say, "90% of this settlement is Palestinian owned" and some Zionist group say, "Nonsense, it's all Jewish owned or government," keep this mess in mind. When there's inconclusive, disputed, or simply oral proof offered by a litigant, it's a question of who, exactly, you believe. The truth is often in the middle. Sometimes it's no where close to being in the middle. And, no, you can't calculate the odds.
The article is entirely he-said/he-said, and who you believe is who you want to believe. What I want to know from this article is: 1. Are the Palestinians' claims written or oral? Waht's the nature of any oral claims, and how old are the Palestinian's claims? What's the evidence that the claim goes back that far? If written, how old are the titles and who issued them? What's the evidence that they're clear? 2. What's the Israeli government's claims? Is the land in a registry of vileti or maliki (state or king's) lands? 3. If the Palestinians' claims aren't old, and the lands were claimed recently, when was the declaration of the land being a firing zone issued? Now, given the wonderful nature of this system of land records, it might still boil down to he-said/he-said, but there's a non-zero chance that somebody might actually have some evidence. Otherwise all the facts are, "So-and-so claimed . . . " Now, a claim isn't a fact. The fact is that "so-and-so claimed."
It's why I think apart from national and local defense, the single most important thing a government does or can do is establish land ownership records. If you have a developing economy, much of your wealth is land; much of your wealth goes to buying land. If you have only territorial claims or religious claims, you have no claim.
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