Palestine's history: a state proclaimed before it governed its land

Who ruled the land before the Ottomans

Settlement in the region is old enough to be dated by archaeology alone. Britannica records the domestication of animals, the cultivation of crops and the building of towns in the Neolithic, with Jericho a town by 7000 BCE; the History of Palestine article places the earliest settlement at Tell es-Sultan, the mound of ancient Jericho, at about 9000 BCE, with walls, a shrine and a stone tower 7 metres high. UNESCO inscribed Ancient Jericho/Tell es-Sultan on the World Heritage List in 2023.

Most of the towns known in historic times were founded in the Early Bronze Age, in the 3rd millennium BCE, as independent city-states that Britannica calls Canaanite for convenience. Egyptian armies conquered the region in the 16th century BCE. In the Iron Age the kingdoms of Israel and Judah held the interior while Philistine and Phoenician cities held the coast, and Assyria, Babylon and Persia conquered it in turn between the 8th and 6th centuries BCE. Alexander took it from the Persians in the 330s BCE, and Rome annexed the Hasmonean kingdom in 63 BCE.

The name the state now carries was first an administrative one. The Romans joined Judea to Galilee and the coast as Syria Palaestina in the 2nd century CE, and the Byzantines split it into Palaestina Prima, Secunda and Tertia. Muslim armies took the region between 636 and 641, and Palaestina Prima became the military district of Jund Filastin, governed from the new city of Ramla. The Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik, who reigned from 685 to 705, built the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Crusaders founded the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099, and the Ayyubids retook the city in 1187. The Mamluks of Egypt, who beat a Mongol army at Ain Jalut in 1260, held Palestine after that, divided it into districts governed from Jerusalem, Gaza and Safed, and razed the coastal towns from Tyre to Gaza against a return of the Crusaders. War, earthquakes and the Black Death left a population the History of Palestine article estimates at about 200,000.

How Ottoman rule gave way to a British mandate

The Ottomans took Palestine from the Mamluks in 1516 and kept most of their administration: five districts, Safad, Nablus, Jerusalem, Lajjun and Gaza, inside a province governed from Damascus. Gaza, Safad and Jerusalem each had about 5,000 to 6,000 people in the early years of Ottoman rule, and most of the population lived in villages. The region was ruled as part of Ottoman Syria for four centuries.

The First World War ended that. In November 1917 the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, supporting "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people", and British forces under Edmund Allenby took Jerusalem on 9 December 1917. The League of Nations approved the British mandate in 1922 with the declaration written into it. The United Nations' own history of the question notes that every other former Ottoman territory placed under a mandate eventually became an independent state, and Palestine did not.

The British census of 1922 counted 763,550 people in Palestine, 89% of them Arab and 11% Jewish. Jewish immigration, mostly from Eastern Europe, grew in the 1930s with Nazi persecution, and 62,000 Jews entered Palestine in 1935. Arab demands for independence and resistance to immigration produced a general strike in April 1936 and a revolt that lasted until 1939. The History of Palestine article estimates that 10% of the adult Palestinian Arab male population was killed, wounded, deported or imprisoned in the British suppression. In 1947 Britain handed the question to the United Nations.

What partition and the first Arab-Israeli war did

On 29 November 1947 the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181 by 33 votes to 13 with 10 abstentions, recommending one Arab state, one Jewish state and an international regime for Jerusalem. The Jewish leadership accepted the plan and the Arab leadership rejected it, and fighting began almost at once. Israel declared independence on 14 May 1948, the British mandate ended the next day, and the armies of neighbouring Arab states entered.

The United Nations records that Israel expanded in that war to 77% of the territory of mandate Palestine, including the larger part of Jerusalem, and that over half of the Palestinian Arab population fled or were expelled. The History of Palestine article puts the number at about 700,000. Palestinians call these events the Nakba, the catastrophe, and keep Nakba Day on 15 May; in Israel the war is remembered as the War of Independence.

What remained in Arab hands became the two territories the State of Palestine now claims. Egypt held a coastal strip about 40 km long and 6 to 8 km wide around the town of Gaza, demarcated by the Egyptian-Israeli armistice of 24 February 1949. An All-Palestine Government declared independence in Gaza City on 1 October 1948, but it had little executive power and was folded into Egyptian administration in 1959. Jordan held the hill country west of the river and annexed it on 24 April 1950; Britannica records that only Britain and Pakistan recognised the annexation. Jerusalem was divided, with Jordan holding the east and the Old City.

How the PLO rose after the Six-Day War

The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964, while the West Bank was still Jordanian. In June 1967 Israel occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt. Britannica counts about 380,000 Palestinians who fled the West Bank after the occupation; the United Nations estimates the second exodus at half a million. Israel extended its law to East Jerusalem and placed the rest under military administration. Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967 set out the formula of withdrawal from occupied territory in return for an end to belligerency, which the Madrid conference of 1991 and the Oslo Accords later named as their base.

Israeli settlement in the occupied territory began soon after 1967. Britannica records that under the government of Menachem Begin, from 1977 to 1983, the number of settlements more than tripled and the number of settlers rose more than fivefold.

The PLO, meanwhile, became the body other states dealt with. An Arab League summit in October 1974 named it the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people", and in November 1974 the UN General Assembly granted it observer status. Under the Camp David Accords of 1978 Egypt gave up any claim of its own to Gaza. A popular uprising, the first intifada, broke out in December 1987, and in July 1988 Jordan renounced its claim to the West Bank, keeping guardianship of the Haram al-Sharif. The proclamation of November 1988 followed, and on 15 December 1988 the General Assembly acknowledged it in Resolution 43/177.

What the Oslo Accords built and left open

Secret talks in Oslo from January 1993 produced an exchange of letters in which the PLO recognised Israel's right to exist and Israel recognised the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. The Declaration of Principles was signed in Washington on 13 September 1993. A further agreement, concluded in Cairo on 4 May 1994, began the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and Jericho, and the Palestinian Authority took over civil functions there within weeks.

The Interim Agreement of 28 September 1995, known as Oslo II, extended self-rule to Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarm, Qalqilyah, Ramallah, Bethlehem and some 440 villages, and divided the West Bank into Areas A, B and C with different shares of Palestinian and Israeli control. Elections for a president and a legislative council were held on 20 January 1996. The accords deferred Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, security and borders to permanent-status talks, with 4 May 1999 as the deadline for an agreement.

The deadline passed. Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister who had signed in 1993, was assassinated on 4 November 1995. A summit at Camp David in July 2000 ended without agreement, and a second intifada began after Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount, which Muslims call the Haram al-Sharif, at the end of September 2000. Britannica records that in 2000 the Palestinian Authority controlled less than one fifth of the West Bank. Israel withdrew its settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip in September 2005 and kept control of its borders, coast and airspace.

Why Gaza and the West Bank are governed apart

The second legislative election, on 25 January 2006, gave Hamas 74 of the 132 seats on 44% of the vote, against 41% for Fatah, the faction that had dominated the PLO. Israel, the United States and the European Union, all of which list Hamas as a terrorist organisation, imposed sanctions. A coalition government failed, fighting between the two movements escalated in Gaza, and in June 2007 Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip. President Mahmoud Abbas dismissed the Hamas-led government, declared a state of emergency and appointed an emergency cabinet in the West Bank.

The split has lasted since. Israel declared Gaza a hostile entity in 2007 and imposed a blockade of power, imports and border crossings, and Egypt kept its own crossing closed until 2011. Reconciliation agreements were signed in 2011 and 2014, and a unity government formed on 2 June 2014, but the Palestinian Authority took over Gaza's public institutions only late in 2017 and withdrew again in January 2019. No legislative election has been held since 2006; the third, scheduled for 22 May 2021, was postponed indefinitely.

How the claim to statehood was pressed abroad

After talks with Israel broke down in 2010, the Palestinian leadership turned to recognition. An application for full UN membership was submitted on 23 September 2011 and stalled in the Security Council. UNESCO admitted Palestine as a member state in 2011. On 29 November 2012 the General Assembly voted 138 to 9, with 41 abstentions, to make Palestine a non-member observer state. Israel's ambassador, Ron Prosor, told the Assembly that day that the route to statehood "runs through direct negotiations between Jerusalem and Ramallah". Palestine joined the International Criminal Court in April 2015.

The United States vetoed a renewed membership resolution in the Security Council on 18 April 2024. On 10 May 2024 the General Assembly voted 143 to 9, with 25 abstentions, that Palestine was qualified for membership and gave it new rights in the Assembly from September 2024, short of a vote. On 19 July 2024 the International Court of Justice gave an advisory opinion, summarised by the United Nations as finding Israel's presence in the occupied territory unlawful and calling on it to end that presence as rapidly as possible. Ten more states announced recognition on 22 September 2025, among them Australia, Canada, France, Portugal and the United Kingdom, and by 23 September 2025 the count stood at 157 of the 193 UN member states.

What the war in Gaza has done

On 7 October 2023 Hamas led an attack on Israel from Gaza in which 1,195 people were killed and 251 taken hostage, by the count the Gaza war article records. Israel's offensive in the Gaza Strip followed. The Gaza Health Ministry reported at least 75,225 Palestinians killed by 27 September 2026; Britannica, counting deaths directly from hostilities, gave at least 54,000 by June 2025, about 2% of the population. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification committee confirmed famine in Gaza Governorate on 22 August 2025. A UN commission of inquiry reported on 16 September 2025 that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza; Israel and the United States reject that finding, and a case brought by South Africa is before the International Court of Justice.

A ceasefire in January 2025 ended with Israeli air strikes on 18 March. A third took effect on 10 October 2025 under a United States plan, and the Hamas civil administration in Gaza resigned on 6 July 2026. The World Bank put Gaza's recovery and reconstruction needs at about US$71.5 billion in May 2026. In the West Bank, Britannica records that Israel's cabinet approved 54 new settlements in 2025 and 35 more by mid-July 2026, and that the refugee camps at Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams were emptied in 2025 after months of military operations.