How US Heirs Unlocked a Sealed Israeli Land File From Abroad

Result: Complete Israel Land Authority lease file released, inherited leasehold registered and sold · Timeline: 11 months · Challenge: Authority refused to correspond with non-resident heirs · Authority: Israel Land Authority and the Government Freedom of Information Unit · Financial Impact: NIS 1,850,000

Background

Three siblings in Maryland cleared out their father's house after he died in 2024. In a folder of Hebrew papers they found a lease dated 1963, signed with what was then the Israel Lands Administration, for a plot in Kiryat Gat. Their father had left Israel in 1971 and never spoke about it. None of them read Hebrew, none had been to Israel since childhood, and the only thing they could establish on their own was that the plot still appeared to exist and was worth something in the region of two million shekels.

The eldest sibling wrote to the Israel Land Authority twice. Both replies said the same thing in different words: the file exists, the Authority corresponds with the registered lessee, and the request could not be processed. A follow-up call from a cousin in Tel Aviv produced a third version of the answer, that freedom of information rights belong to Israeli citizens and residents. The family concluded the asset was unreachable. It was not, but the route to it was statutory rather than administrative.

The Challenge

The obstacle was standing, not secrecy. Section 1 of the Freedom of Information Law 5758-1998 grants the right to receive information from a public authority to every Israeli citizen or resident, and three people in Maryland are neither. Officials who stop reading at Section 1 refuse the request without ever reaching the content, which is exactly what happened here. Section 12 is the provision that decides these cases. It applies the law to a requester who is not a citizen or resident with respect to information concerning that person's rights in Israel, and a file on land you have inherited sits squarely inside that formulation. The refusals the family had collected did not mention Section 12 at all.

There was a second problem underneath the first. Section 12 turns on the requester's own rights, and until an Israeli succession order issued, the siblings were three foreigners asserting a family connection to a dead man's paperwork. The lease was in their father's name. Nothing in their possession proved to an Israeli official that his rights had passed to them. The order had to come first, and that meant a Maryland estate and an Israeli probate file running in parallel before a single freedom of information form could be filed usefully.

In Practice: Section 7 of the Freedom of Information Law 5758-1998 gives a public authority 30 days to answer, extendable by the head of the authority for a further 30 days, and 15 days to hand over the material once release is approved. Every authority must appoint an information officer (memuneh) under Section 3, and the list is published by the Government Freedom of Information Unit at the Ministry of Justice. The fees are NIS 24 to submit, NIS 36 per work hour from the fourth hour of handling, and NIS 0.24 per photocopied page, against an undertaking capped at NIS 178. This request cost NIS 153.60 in total and the file arrived on day 71.

What We Did

We took the succession order first and the file second, because the reverse order fails.

The father had died domiciled in Maryland, so the American estate was already open. Under the Succession Law 1965 the Israeli assets needed their own order, and we filed an application with the Inheritance Registrar (Rasham HaYerushot) supported by an apostilled death certificate, apostilled consents from all three siblings, and a certified Hebrew translation of the Maryland grant. All three signed before a notary in Baltimore and the documents were apostilled by the Maryland Secretary of State. No one flew anywhere. The order issued in just under four months, which is ordinary for an uncontested file with foreign documents.

With the order in hand, the freedom of information request became a different document. We addressed it to the information officer at the Israel Land Authority by email, in Hebrew, and led with the connection rather than the question. Attached were the succession order, the apostilled death certificate, the siblings' passports, and the 1963 lease from the father's folder. The request itself named Section 12 in its first line, stated that the subject matter was the applicants' own rights in Israeli land, and asked for the complete lease file (tik chachira) including the original contract, every renewal, all payment records, and any correspondence about consent to transfer.

The Authority acknowledged within a week and then used its extension. On day 34 a letter arrived invoking the further 30 days permitted by Section 7, and on day 56 came a partial decision: release approved, with redactions under Section 9 covering the personal details of a co-signatory on a 1994 document who had no connection to the family. We did not fight the redaction. It concerned a stranger, the Authority is obliged to give a third party an opportunity to object before disclosing material that touches them, and litigating it would have cost months for nothing. The file itself was couriered as a scanned bundle of 240 pages on day 71, against a payment of NIS 153.60.

What the pages contained changed the whole matter. The original 1963 lease ran for 49 years. A renewal signed in 1994 extended it. Most importantly, a receipt from 2007 showed the lease had been capitalised (hivun), meaning the ground rent had been prepaid for the balance of the term. A capitalised lease transfers without a fresh consent process and without the consent fee the family had been quietly dreading, and none of this was discoverable from outside the file. We then registered the succession order against the rights at the Authority, instructed a local surveyor to confirm the boundaries against the 2007 plan in the bundle, and listed the plot. It sold nine weeks later to an Israeli buyer for NIS 1,850,000.

In Practice: Inheriting Israeli real estate is not itself a taxable event. Section 4 of the Real Estate Taxation Law 1963 places inheritance outside the definition of a sale, so no betterment tax (mas shevach) arose on the transfer to the siblings. Tax attached only on the later sale, and it was computed from the father's 1963 acquisition rather than from the date of death, which produced a materially larger gain than the family expected. The declaration is due to the Israel Tax Authority within 30 days of signing under Section 73 of the same law, and the assessment and clearance certificate for the Land Registry took a further 10 weeks.

The Outcome

Eleven months after the first letter, three people who had been told the file was closed to them held every page of it, owned registered rights in the plot, and had NIS 1,850,000 in cleared proceeds to divide. The freedom of information request that produced the breakthrough cost NIS 153.60. The succession order, the translations, the apostilles, the surveyor and the sale all cost considerably more, but none of that work could have been scoped, priced or even justified without first knowing what the lease said.

The quieter result was the capitalisation receipt. Had the lease been uncapitalised, the sale would have required the Authority's consent and a capitalisation payment calculated on current land values, which on a plot of this size in Kiryat Gat would have run well into six figures in shekels. The family had been advised informally, before the file was opened, to assume such a payment. Two pages inside a 240-page bundle removed it.

Key Takeaways

What this case illustrates for non-residents in similar situations:

1. A refusal that says freedom of information is only for citizens and residents is an incomplete reading of the statute, not a final answer. Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Law 5758-1998 exists precisely for a person abroad asking about their own rights in Israel, and a refusal that never engages with it is the kind most often reversed on a Section 17 petition to the Administrative Affairs Court.
2. Get the succession order before you ask for the file. A request about a deceased relative's assets succeeds or fails on whether the applicant can show the rights are now theirs, and nothing does that as cleanly as an order from the Inheritance Registrar.
3. Lead the request with the connection, not the curiosity. Identity documents, the succession order and any contract in your possession should be attached at the outset, in Hebrew where possible, addressed to the named information officer rather than to a general enquiries address.
4. Budget for time rather than money. The statutory maximum stretches to roughly 120 days in defined cases, and third-party privacy under Section 9 adds weeks whenever the file mentions somebody else. The fee itself is trivial by comparison.
5. Never price an Israeli leasehold before reading its file. Whether a lease has been capitalised decides whether a transfer needs the Authority's consent and payment, and that single fact can move the net proceeds by hundreds of thousands of shekels. Our guide to Israel Land Authority leasehold for non-residents explains what to look for once the file is in front of you.

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Facing a Similar Situation?

If an Israeli authority has told you that a file concerning property, an estate or a decision affecting you cannot be released because you live abroad, the question is whether the refusal addressed Section 12 at all. Our answer on filing a freedom of information request as a non-citizen sets out the statutory framework in full.

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