Palestine's geography: two territories, one ridge and one coast

Why the two territories do not touch

The West Bank and the Gaza Strip are the two parts of mandate Palestine that stayed in Arab hands at the armistices of 1949, and the lines drawn then still define them. The West Bank is bordered by Jordan to the east, along the Jordan River and the Dead Sea, and by Israel to the north, west and south; it is landlocked, with land boundaries of 404 km. The Gaza Strip has the Mediterranean to the west, a border of 11 km with Egypt near Rafah and a border of 51 km with Israel on its northern and eastern sides. The shortest route between the two crosses Israel.

Both areas are measured slightly differently by different publishers. The West Bank article on Wikipedia gives 5,628 or 5,640 square kilometres, about 21.2% of mandate Palestine west of the Jordan, and counts 220 square kilometres of water, the north-western quarter of the Dead Sea. Britannica gives 5,660. For Gaza, Britannica gives 363 square kilometres and the Gaza Strip article 365, over a strip 41 km long and 6 to 12 km wide.

How the West Bank falls from ridge to rift

The West Bank is mostly north-south limestone hills, which Britannica calls the Samarian Hills north of Jerusalem and the Judaean Hills south of it, averaging 700 to 900 metres in height. Named summits include Mount Gerizim at 881 m, Nabi Samwil at 890 m and Mount Scopus at 826 m, and the highest point is Mount Nabi Yunis. The rock is marine sediment, limestone and dolomite.

Samaria, in the north, has wider and gentler basins than Judaea, such as the Arrabah plain and the basin around Nablus, and is approached from the Jordan by the Fari'ah valley. From Ramallah southward the high plateau of Judaea is, in Britannica's description, a rocky wilderness of limestone with rare patches of cultivation, as around al-Bireh and Hebron. On its eastern side the plateau falls abruptly into the Jordan Valley, reached with difficulty down wadis such as the Qelt.

The Jordan Valley is a rift between 2.5 and 22 km wide that descends to about 400 metres below sea level. It is a segment of the Dead Sea Transform, the fault that separates the African and Arabian plates.

The Geography of Palestine article lists destructive earthquakes along it in 31 BCE and in 363, 749 and 1033 CE. The valley is dry and hot, and cultivation is limited to irrigated land and oases such as Jericho, where UNESCO describes a perennial spring, Ain es-Sultan, beside a settlement mound already permanent by the 9th to 8th millennium BCE.

Not all of the West Bank drains to the Jordan, because streams rising on the higher western ground run west towards the Mediterranean, while wadis such as Wadi Fa'rah and Wadi Qelt run east into the river or the Dead Sea. The valley of Marj Sanur holds a seasonal lake.

What the Gaza Strip is built of

The Gaza Strip sits on a relatively flat coastal plain. Three ridges run parallel to the shore, built of a wind-laid calcareous sandstone called kurkar, with red fine-grained soils called hamra between the layers, and wadis filled with alluvium separate them. Dunes line the coast. The highest point, Abu 'Awdah, stands 105 m above sea level.

Wadi Gaza is the strip's main watercourse, and a nature reserve around it protects the only coastal wetland in the territory.

The towns follow the coast and the ridges. Rafah lies on the Egyptian border, Khan Yunis 7 km north-east of it, Deir el-Balah on the coast between Khan Yunis and Gaza City, and Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun beyond Gaza City in the north. The Israeli settlement bloc of Gush Katif stood on the dunes beside Rafah and Khan Yunis until 2005.

Where the rain falls and where it does not

Rain comes in the cool half of the year, from October to April, and decreases from north to south and from the coast inland. In the West Bank the north-western hills receive more than 685 mm a year, and the amount falls to under 100 mm along the Dead Sea in the south-east. The hills have a Mediterranean climate, slightly cooler with height; the eastern slopes, the Judaean Desert and the Dead Sea shore are dry and hot.

Gaza has a hot semi-arid climate, and Britannica puts its annual precipitation at about 300 mm, and the Gaza Strip article gives a range from 225 mm in the south to 400 mm in the north, almost all of it between November and February. Britannica gives average temperatures of about 13 °C in winter and the mid to upper 20s in summer; the Geography of Palestine article gives July and August as the hottest months, with an average high of 33 °C.

Who controls the water in the hills

The porosity of the limestone lets rain filter down to the impermeable layers that feed the aquifers, and the West Bank highlands are the main recharge area for the coastal aquifers on the Israeli side. Britannica notes that perennial rivers are few in the whole region and that this porosity makes the shortage worse. The division of groundwater was written into the Oslo II agreement of 1995, and Israel supplied the Palestinian territories with 52 million cubic metres in 2012 from its own and desalinated supply.

The Geography of Palestine article cites Friends of the Earth Middle East as reporting that up to 96% of the Jordan's fresh water is diverted by Israel, Jordan and Syria, while untreated sewage is discharged into the river. In Gaza the problems listed by the same article are salination of fresh water, depletion and contamination of the groundwater, and sewage. Between a third and a half of the water delivered in the Palestinian territories is lost in the distribution network.

What the ground holds besides farmland

The Dead Sea is the territory's mineral resource. Its muds and brines carry magnesium, potash and bromine, and the Geography of Palestine article records that these are worked by Israeli settlements; the Palestinian policy network Al-Shabaka estimated in 2015 that access to them could have added $918 million a year to the Palestinian economy.

Stone is the other: the West Bank article records that Israel licenses eleven settlement quarries that sell 94% of their output to Israel, while permits for most of the roughly 40 Palestinian-owned quarries at Beit Fajar are refused. The same article calculates that a further 275 quarries could open in Area C if the restrictions were lifted, and cites a World Bank estimate that the near ban on Palestinian quarry permits there costs the economy at least US$241 million a year.

Offshore, a gas field known as Gaza Marine was found in 2000 under a licence the Palestinian Authority granted to British Gas. It had not been developed by 2024.

Three terrestrial ecoregions are found in the territory: Eastern Mediterranean conifer, sclerophyllous and broadleaf forest, the Arabian Desert and the Mesopotamian shrub desert. The Palestine article divides the territory into five ecological zones, the Central Highlands, the Semi-coastal Region, the Eastern Slopes, the Jordan Rift Valley and the Coastal Region, and counts 373 bird species recorded in the occupied Palestinian areas. Forest and woodland cover about 1% of the West Bank.

How the land is farmed and divided

Water decides land use. Britannica describes the better-watered unirrigated hills, especially in Samaria, used for grazing sheep and for cereals, olives and fruit, and the irrigated land of the hills and the Jordan valley farmed intensively for fruit and vegetables. The West Bank article puts arable land at 27% of the area. At Battir, south-west of Jerusalem, UNESCO's World Heritage listing of 2014 describes valleys of stone terraces, some irrigated for vegetables and others dry and planted with vines and olives, fed by channels from underground springs and shared between the village's families by a traditional rota.

In Gaza, Britannica describes nearly three-quarters of the land as cultivated, with citrus as the chief crop on irrigated land, followed by vegetables, wheat and olives.

The land is also divided by administration. Under Oslo II the West Bank was split into Area A, 18% of its area, under Palestinian civil and security control; Area B, 22%, under Palestinian civil control with joint security; and Area C, 60%, under Israeli control. The Palestine article on Wikipedia records that 81% of the designated protected areas lie in Area C. The Israeli barrier, begun on 23 June 2002 and 708 km long as approved, leaves 9% of the West Bank in a closed zone between the barrier and the 1949 line, by the West Bank article's count. In Gaza, a buffer zone along the Israeli border covered 14% of the strip and 30 to 55% of its arable land before the ceasefire of November 2012, by the Gaza Strip article's account.

Where people live on the land

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics estimated 3,395,260 people in the West Bank and 2,349,301 in the Gaza Strip for 2025, figures prepared before October 2023; its revised estimate put Gaza at 2,114,301 in mid-2025, 10% below the earlier figure. Britannica adds about 750,000 Israelis living in the West Bank to its 2026 estimate for the territory, and gives Gaza a density of 6,024 people per square kilometre in 2023.

In the West Bank most people live along the mountain spine running north to south, in Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, al-Bireh, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron and Yattah. Qalqilyah and Tulkarm lie in the low foothills on the western edge, and Jericho and Tubas in the Jordan Valley. East Jerusalem sits at the centre of the West Bank. Israel administers it as part of its own Jerusalem District, and the State of Palestine claims it as part of the Jerusalem Governorate; in 2010, of its 456,000 people, roughly 60% were Palestinian and 40% Israeli, by the Palestine article's figures.

The West Bank article counted over 450,000 Israeli settlers in 132 settlements in 2022, excluding East Jerusalem, and a further 220,000 in 12 settlements in East Jerusalem. The same article cites a European Union report of 2011: between 200,000 and 320,000 Palestinians lived in the Jordan Valley before 1967 and about 56,000 by 2011, most of them in Jericho, while the Jewish population of Area C grew from 1,200 to 310,000 over a similar period.

Britannica records that the first accurate census there, in September 1967, found nearly half of the population living in refugee camps, and the Gaza Strip article notes that the camps are managed by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. The Palestinian Authority divides the territory into 16 governorates, 11 in the West Bank and 5 in the Gaza Strip.