Historically, Islamic Sharia courts across the Ottoman empire used a document called hujja (literally translated as proof) for registering property transactions and demonstrating ownership. In present-day Jordan, the use of hujja has been declared illegal by the Department of Lands and Survey. Yet, in Palestinian camps, hujjaj (plural for hujja) continue to be used for transferring the possession of homes, establishing building guidelines, and demonstrating occupancy for utility connections. Particularly, in the camps that have been self-built by Palestinians themselves and that remain unrecognized by the UNRWA and deemed “squatter settlement” by the Jordanian government. By taking up the case of Muhammad Amin Camp – a self-built Palestinian camp in eastern Amman on a plot of land that remains the legal property of a Jordanian Circassian whose ancestors came to Amman as Ottoman refugees – this paper examines how, on the one hand, land tenure gets entangled with the individual property rights of the Circassian landowners, the competing claims of the Palestinian inhabitants and the overriding power of the state before/after the now obscured events of September 1970, and on the other hand, how hujjaj continue to be used to facilitate the inhabitation of the refugee camp (its internal order, building guidelines, real estate market, inheritance, and water and electricity flows). Rather than taking the self-built Palestinian camp for granted, or assuming it to be part of the informal urban growth of Middle Eastern cities, this paper puts the “squatter” and the “informal” settlement back into Palestine studies and in older genealogies of Ottoman property regimes.