Municipalities of Palestine
In Palestine (formally the Palestinian Arab Republic), one of the 20 republics of the Arab Union, a municipality (Arabic: بلدية baladiyah, pl. بلديات baladiyāt; Hebrew: עירייה ’iriyah, pl. עיריות ’iriyot) is a unit of local government. As in the other republics, municipalities function as administrative divisions of Palestine, and form the third and lowest tier in the Arab Union's three-tiered system of government; no distinction such as counties or districts exists, and as such all municipalities are distinct from one another and their councils (municipal governments) equally subordinate to the Palestinian government.
Municipalities are commonly known as "council areas", as each municipality is governed by an elected government which is called a municipal council. There are currently 105 municipalities/council areas in Palestine, the most populous of which is Jerusalem, which is also the republic's capital and largest city. Unlike many other municipalities, the Municipality of Jerusalem is more or less coterminous with the modern city proper, with surrounding cities like Eizariya, Bethlehem, El-Ram, Ramallah, Hamleh and Jahalin constituting much of the capital's metropolitan area.
A unique aspect of municipalities in Palestine is that many have both an official Hebrew name and an official Arabic name, as Palestine is the only republic of the Arab Union to have two official languages of equal status. This is not mandatory, however: all major cities have both an official Hebrew and official Arabic name, as do the majority of other municipalities with mixed populations. By contrast, more or less homogeneous municipalities (that is, municipalities composed entirely or almost entirely of either Jews or Arabs) for the most part use only one language for their official name, with the counterpart (other) language simply transliterating the name in the native language. For example, the city of Jerusalem is ירושלים yerushalayim in Hebrew and القُدس al-quds in Arabic, while the Jewish-majority university town of Ariel (אריאל ari’el) is simply rendered in Arabic as أرئيل ari’īl, which is a transliteration from Hebrew as opposed to a unique Arabic name.
