A Brief History of Palestine: Olive Trees, Exile, and a Nation Still Waiting for Its State

Companion: A Brief History of Israel: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Land Both Call Home (this series). That piece tells the land's ancient history, Zionism, the State of Israel and the wars between them in depth. This one tells the same century from the side of Palestinian society, and points back to it rather than repeating it.

A note on words: every term in this history is contested. Where the UN, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) or other bodies have made findings, they are quoted, dated and set next to the replies of those who reject them. The UN, the ICJ and most governments call the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza the "Occupied Palestinian Territory", and this piece uses "occupation" in that sense; Israel's government disputes the word for the West Bank, which it calls "disputed" territory or Judea and Samaria. Words such as "martyr", "resistance", "terrorism", "apartheid" and "genocide" are attributed to whoever uses them. Casualty figures say whose count they are.

Every October, when the first rains are close, Palestinian families in the West Bank go out to their olive groves with ladders, tarpaulins and thermoses of sweet tea. Grandparents who can no longer climb sit on mats sorting the fruit; children are let off school to help. The trees, some of them centuries old, are the closest thing Palestinians have to a national symbol that every village shares, and the harvest is as much a family reunion as it is work.

In October 2026 the harvest took place under the worst conditions on record. The UN's humanitarian office, OCHA, reported that between 1 and 26 October there had been 397 settler attacks causing casualties or property damage across the West Bank, "the highest monthly number ... since documentation began in 2006". In one week alone it counted 38 attacks linked to the olive harvest. In Hebron, after two Palestinian gunmen killed two Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint on 23 October, the Israeli army closed the city and ordered families out of two neighbourhoods; the municipality said about 3,000 people had been displaced. Israeli police and the Shin Bet security service, for their part, arrested ten Israelis over settler assaults on a foreign photojournalist and a group of diplomats. In Gaza, a year after a ceasefire, families who had lost their homes were preparing for a third winter in tents.

To understand why, and to understand a people who have kept their identity through all of it, you have to go back a long way: to the villages of Ottoman Palestine, to the newspapers and congresses where a national movement took shape, to 1948, which Israelis remember as their War of Independence and Palestinians as the Nakba, "the catastrophe", and to the camps, the diaspora, the uprisings and the poems that followed.

In this history

1. The land and its peoples (to 1516)
2. Ottoman Palestine: villages, towns and families (1516–1917)
3. A nation takes shape: from the Ottomans to the Mandate (1899–1947)
4. 1948: the Nakba (1947–1949)
5. Refugees, UNRWA, and Jordanian and Egyptian rule (1948–1967)
6. The PLO, Fatah and the diaspora (1959–1993)
7. Palestinian citizens of Israel (1948–2026)
8. Occupation as daily life (1967–2026)
9. Intifadas, Oslo and the Palestinian Authority (1987–2006)
10. Hamas, the 2006 election and the split (1987–2023)
11. 7 October and the Gaza war, from Palestinian society's side (2023–2026)
12. Statehood, the economy and the present (1974–2026)
13. Culture: poems, stitches, songs and food
14. How to understand Palestine today

Part 1 — The land and its peoples (to 1516)

A land of many layers

The land the Palestinians call Filastin runs from the Mediterranean coast to the Jordan River, and from the hills of Galilee to the Negev desert. The companion piece on Israel describes its geography, its names and its ancient history: the Canaanites, the Philistines on the southern coast who gave the land its later name, the Israelite kingdoms, the Jewish revolts against Rome and the Roman decision, after 135 CE, to call the province Syria Palaestina. This part does not retell that story. It asks a different question: who were the ancestors of the people who call themselves Palestinians today?

The honest answer is: almost everyone who ever lived here. Empires came and went, but most of the farmers who worked the land did not leave with them. Over the centuries the villagers of the hills and plains spoke Aramaic, then Greek in the towns, then Arabic; they were pagans, Jews and Samaritans, then mostly Christians under Byzantium, and then, gradually, mostly Muslims. Arab tribes and soldiers, Egyptian peasants, Crusader-era Europeans, Kurds, Turks, Circassians and Bosnians all settled at different times and married in. Palestinian historians and many others stress this continuity: the people did not arrive in the seventh century with the Arab armies, they were Arabised and largely Islamised in place.

Jewish tradition and Zionism stress a different continuity: the bond of the Jewish people, in exile and in the land, with the same hills. The Israel piece is right that both continuities are real. Genetic studies suggest that Palestinians, Jews and other peoples of the Levant share deep common ancestry, though how such studies should be read is itself debated; this history does not rest any argument on them.

Jund Filastin and Ramla

The name Palestine survived in Arabic. After the Arab conquest of the 630s, the caliphs divided Syria into military districts, and one of them was Jund Filastin, "the military district of Palestine". Around the beginning of the eighth century the Umayyad prince Sulayman ibn Abd al-Malik, who governed it before becoming caliph in 715, founded a new capital for the district at Ramla, near the old town of Lydda. Ramla grew into a market town for the grain and fruit of the coastal plain and a centre of weaving, dyeing and pottery, while Jerusalem, al-Quds, "the Holy", remained the religious heart of the land.

For Muslims, Jerusalem is the third holiest city, tied to the Prophet Muhammad's night journey, with the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque on the platform Muslims call al-Haram al-Sharif and Jews the Temple Mount (see the Israel piece). Christians, and later Muslims, made pilgrimages to the land's holy places, and the towns of Bethlehem, Nazareth and Hebron (al-Khalil, named for Abraham, the "Friend" of God) grew around shrines.

The village world

By the end of the Mamluk period the society that would later call itself Palestinian had taken a recognisable shape: hundreds of hill villages of stone houses, terraced fields of olives, figs, grapes and wheat; market towns where peasants sold their crops; Bedouin tribes in the Negev and the Jordan Valley; scholarly and religious families in Jerusalem, Hebron and Nablus who administered the endowments of the holy places; and small Christian, Jewish and Samaritan communities living alongside the Muslim majority. The Samaritans, who descend from an ancient Israelite people and still keep their own Torah, live today on Mount Gerizim above Nablus, a reminder of how many layers the land holds.

Most of the families who lived in Palestine in 1900 had been there, in one form or another, for as long as anyone could remember. That is the root of the Palestinian claim to the land: not a date of arrival, but the absence of one.

Part 2 — Ottoman Palestine: villages, towns and families (1516–1917)

Four centuries of the sultans

The Ottoman Turks took the land from the Mamluks in 1516–17 and ruled it for four hundred years. "Palestine" was not one Ottoman province. Its districts, sanjaks, of Jerusalem, Nablus, Gaza, Acre and Safed answered at different times to governors in Damascus, Sidon or Beirut, and from the 1870s Jerusalem became a special district answering directly to Istanbul. Yet people in the region, and the Ottoman courts themselves, spoke of Filastin or the Holy Land as a place with a recognisable shape.

How the villages lived

Most Palestinians were fellahin, peasant farmers, who lived in villages led by a headman, the mukhtar, and organised by extended families or clans, the hamula. Land around many villages was held in common and periodically redistributed among families, a system called musha'a. Families married within the village or the clan; land and honour were passed down; feuds and alliances could last generations. Villages and clans across the hill country were loosely divided into two rival factional networks, Qays and Yaman, which had nothing to do with their names' origins in ancient Arabian tribes and everything to do with local power.

The Palestinian historian Beshara Doumani, in Rediscovering Palestine (1995), reconstructed the world of Jabal Nablus, the hill country around Nablus, from 1700 to 1900 through court records and merchants' papers. He found not a stagnant backwater but a busy regional economy: peasants growing olives, cotton and grain; merchants lending money against future harvests; and urban families investing in soap factories.

Strongmen and revolts

Ottoman rule was often indirect. In the eighteenth century a Galilee sheikh, Zahir al-Umar, built what was in effect his own state in northern Palestine. From the 1730s he took Tiberias, then Safed and Nazareth; in 1750 he made the port of Acre his capital, growing rich on cotton sold to French merchants. He was killed in August 1775 when the Ottomans moved against him, and Acre passed to the governor Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar, who in 1799 held the city against Napoleon. Many Palestinians later looked back on Zahir as a forerunner of local self-rule.

In 1831 the army of Muhammad Ali, the ruler of Egypt, conquered Syria and Palestine under his son Ibrahim Pasha. When Ibrahim ordered the conscription of one in five Muslim men of fighting age in April 1834, the notables of Nablus, Hebron and Jerusalem refused, and from May to August 1834 peasants, townspeople and Bedouin rose in the peasants' revolt, briefly taking Jerusalem before Ibrahim crushed them. The Ottomans returned in 1840.

Reform, land and the world market

The nineteenth century brought the Ottoman reforms called the Tanzimat, consulates, missionary schools, steamships, a railway from Jaffa to Jerusalem (1892) and pilgrims by the thousand. The Land Code of 1858 required land to be registered in individual names. Fearing taxes and conscription, many villagers registered their land in the names of urban notables or merchants, or not at all. The consequence would be felt in the twentieth century, when absentee owners, some of them living in Beirut, could sell land out from under the families who had farmed it for generations.

The largest example was the sale by the Sursock family, Greek Orthodox bankers in Beirut, of much of the fertile Jezreel Valley (Marj Ibn Amer) and land around Haifa Bay to Zionist purchasers, mainly between 1901 and 1925. By one count, 1,746 tenant families, about 8,730 people, were evicted, receiving small compensation. For Zionists, these were legal purchases from willing sellers; for Palestinians, they became the archetype of a peasantry dispossessed by transactions it had no part in.

Christians, Muslims and Jews

Late-Ottoman Palestine was overwhelmingly Arab and Muslim, with a large Christian minority (by the British census of 1922, Christians were about one in ten people) concentrated in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Ramallah and Jaffa. Christian Palestinians, Orthodox, Catholic and later Protestant, were prominent in trade, education and the press. The old Jewish communities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias were joined from 1882 by Zionist immigrants (see the Israel piece). Relations between the long-settled communities were generally peaceful, with the inequalities of Ottoman rule; relations with the new colonies, which bought land and sometimes refused to employ Arab labour, quickly became tense.

In 1900 a Palestinian peasant might have told you that he was a Muslim, from such-and-such a village, of such-and-such a clan, a subject of the sultan and an Arab. Within a generation, many of those same people were calling themselves Palestinians first.

Part 3 — A nation takes shape: from the Ottomans to the Mandate (1899–1947)

"Let Palestine be left alone"

On 1 March 1899 Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, a former mayor of Jerusalem and a member of the first Ottoman parliament, wrote in French to Zadoc Kahn, the chief rabbi of France, asking that his letter reach Theodor Herzl. He respected the Jews and their history, he wrote, and understood the persecution behind Zionism, but Palestine was already inhabited, and a Jewish state there would provoke resistance. It closes with the plea that Palestinians still quote: "in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone". Herzl replied on 19 March, arguing that Jewish immigration would benefit everyone and asking, "who would think of sending them away?" The exchange is often read today as the conflict's first correspondence.

Newspapers, deputies and identity

After the Young Turk revolution of 1908 restored the Ottoman constitution, Jerusalem elected deputies to the new parliament, among them Yusuf Diya's nephew Ruhi al-Khalidi, who became deputy speaker and in 1911 raised Zionism in a parliamentary debate, arguing against Jewish immigration to Palestine while insisting he was not arguing against Palestine's own Jews. A press flourished. In Haifa, Najib Nassar, a Christian, founded al-Karmil in December 1908 with the stated purpose of "opposing Zionist colonization"; in Jaffa in 1911 the cousins Issa and Yousef El-Issa founded Filastin, whose very name made the argument (see the Israel piece).

The historian Rashid Khalidi, in Palestinian Identity (1997), argues that Palestinians held several overlapping loyalties at once: to their town or village, to Islam or Christianity, to the Ottoman state, to the Arab nation, and increasingly to Palestine as a land with Jerusalem at its centre. Critics of Palestinian nationalism argue that a separate Palestinian national identity emerged mainly in reaction to Zionism and later, after 1948 or 1967. Khalidi and others reply that most national identities, including many in Europe, crystallised in the same decades and against some rival; that reaction does not make an identity less real.

The Mandate from the Palestinian side

When the British took Jerusalem in December 1917 and, in 1922, received a League of Nations Mandate that incorporated the Balfour Declaration (see the Israel piece for its text), Palestinians made up about nine in ten of the population. Most saw the Mandate as a betrayal of wartime promises of Arab independence, and of the principle of self-determination.

They organised quickly. The first Muslim-Christian Association was founded in Jaffa on 8 May 1918, and the associations soon spread to every town: the very name was a statement that Palestinian nationalism included both faiths. From January 1919 to 1928 they convened seven Palestine Arab Congresses, which elected an Arab Executive led for most of the period by the former mayor of Jerusalem, Musa Kazim al-Husseini. Their demands were consistent: independence, a government elected by the majority, an end to the Balfour policy and to mass Jewish immigration.

The British appointed Haj Amin al-Husseini Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921 and head of a new Supreme Muslim Council. Palestinian politics became a rivalry between notable families, above all the Husseinis and the Nashashibis, and between those who sought to work with the British and those who refused. A younger generation founded the pan-Arab Istiqlal (Independence) party in August 1932. Women organised too: in 1929 about 200 women met in Jerusalem for the first Arab Women's Congress.

Society and economy

The Mandate decades transformed Palestinian society. Jaffa and Haifa grew into busy modern cities with cinemas, cafés, sports clubs and dozens of newspapers; citrus exports boomed; a professional middle class of teachers, lawyers, clerks and doctors emerged. Rural poverty, debt and land loss continued, and many villagers moved to the cities to work in construction, the ports and British army camps. The Jewish community, the Yishuv, meanwhile built a separate economy, and its labour federation campaigned for "Hebrew labour" in Jewish enterprises, which shut many Arab workers out. Palestinians lacked anything like the Jewish Agency: their leaders refused British offers of a legislative council that would have accepted the Mandate's terms, a choice still debated by Palestinian historians as principled, a mistake, or both.

Al-Qassam and the great revolt

In the early 1930s a Syrian-born preacher in Haifa, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, organised armed cells among the poor workers and displaced peasants of the city. On 20 November 1935 British police cornered him in the hills near Ya'bad, near Jenin, and killed him and three of his men. His death electrified a younger generation. (Hamas would later name its armed wing after him.)

In April 1936 a general strike began. Shops closed, workers walked out, and for six months, from April to October 1936, Palestinian towns tried to bring the Mandate to a halt; a newly formed Arab Higher Committee under Haj Amin took charge of it. After a British commission under Lord Peel proposed partition in 1937, the revolt resumed as a rural guerrilla war, and in some months rebels controlled much of the hill country.

The British crushed it. They imposed collective fines and curfews, demolished houses, detained thousands in camps, executed rebels and deported five leaders to the Seychelles; Haj Amin fled. In 1945 Britain consolidated its emergency laws into the Defence (Emergency) Regulations, which permitted military courts, house demolitions and detention without trial; Israel later incorporated them into its own law, and amended versions remain part of the legal system in the West Bank.

By one estimate, about one in ten adult Palestinian men aged 20 to 60 was killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled during the revolt (the Israel piece gives the death tolls). The revolt also turned on itself, with killings of Palestinians accused of collaboration and feuds between rebel bands and the Nashashibi camp. When the revolt ended in 1939, Palestinian society had been disarmed, its leaders scattered and its politics divided, less than a decade before the war that would decide its fate.

Palestinian historians call the revolt of 1936–39 the first intifada before the word existed. It won a British promise, the White Paper of 1939, and lost almost everything else.

Two episodes of these years weigh heavily in Israeli memory and must be named in a Palestinian history too: the killing of 67 Jews in Hebron by Arab rioters in August 1929 (some of the survivors were hidden by Arab neighbours, though how many is debated), and Haj Amin al-Husseini's wartime collaboration with Nazi Germany after he fled to Berlin. Israelis cite both as evidence of an Arab hostility that preceded any Palestinian loss; Palestinians reply that the Mufti did not speak for all Palestinians, and that a people resisting the loss of its country cannot be defined by its worst leaders. Both arguments are taken up in the Israel piece.

Part 4 — 1948: the Nakba (1947–1949)

The partition vote

On 29 November 1947 the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem under international rule (the figures and the vote are in the Israel piece). The Arab Higher Committee and the Arab states rejected it. Palestinians saw a plan that gave more than half the land to a third of the population, who then owned a small fraction of it, and that placed some 400,000 Arabs inside the proposed Jewish state. Israelis, and the Zionist leaders who accepted the plan, see the rejection as the moment Palestinians chose war over a state of their own. Both arguments are still made, almost word for word, in 2026.

The war of the villages

Fighting began the next day. From December 1947 to May 1948 a civil war raged between Jewish and Palestinian Arab forces. On the Palestinian side, irregulars were organised in local bands, in the Army of the Holy War led by Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, and in the Arab League's volunteer Arab Liberation Army. They besieged Jewish Jerusalem and ambushed convoys. But Palestinian society had never recovered from the defeat of 1939. Its forces were poorly armed and uncoordinated, and many of its political leaders were abroad.

On 8 April 1948 Abd al-Qadir was killed in the battle for al-Qastal, a village commanding the road to Jerusalem. The next day came the killing of villagers at Deir Yassin by Irgun and Lehi fighters (see the Israel piece). News of the massacre spread fear across the country. In April and May the mixed cities fell: Tiberias, Haifa, Jaffa, Safed. In Haifa and Jaffa, tens of thousands of Arabs fled by land and sea under attack, many expecting to return when the fighting ended.

On 13 May 1948, the day before Israel's declaration of independence, Arab Legion soldiers and local villagers overran the Jewish settlement bloc of Gush Etzion south of Bethlehem; at Kfar Etzion, of 127 defenders who died, some fifteen were killed after surrendering, by one historian's count. Two weeks later the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City surrendered to the Arab Legion; its residents were taken prisoner or evacuated, and the quarter was pillaged and razed. Israelis remember these events as part of the price of 1948, as Palestinians remember Deir Yassin.

15 May and after

On 14 May 1948 Israel declared independence, and the next day the armies of neighbouring Arab states entered. Israelis call what followed the War of Independence: a war of survival against invading armies. Palestinians call the whole of 1947–49 the Nakba, "the catastrophe". Both names describe something that happened.

In the summer and autumn of 1948 the expulsions and flight continued. In July, Israeli forces captured Lydda and Ramle and expelled tens of thousands of inhabitants on foot towards the Arab Legion lines in the heat (the Israel piece gives the figures). In October, during Operation Yoav in the south, soldiers killed villagers at al-Dawayima, near Hebron; the death toll is disputed, from about 30 women and children in a figure the Arab Legion's British commander attributed to a UN report, to "hundreds" in the estimate of the Israeli historian Benny Morris; Israeli commanders at the time ordered the reports of killings checked. At Tantura on the coast, on 22–23 May, the killings of men after the village surrendered were denied for decades, until Israeli veterans described them in a 2022 documentary; how many died is still unknown, with estimates from "dozens" to more than 200.

By the end of the war more than 700,000 Palestinians, about half the Arab population of Mandate Palestine, had become refugees. Between about 400 and 600 villages were emptied, most of them later destroyed. The Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, in All That Remains (1992), documented 418 of them, with photographs, maps and the names of the families who had lived there.

The historians' argument, from the Palestinian side

Why did they leave? For decades the Israeli official account said that Arab leaders told them to. Palestinian historians, Walid Khalidi first among them in 1959, argued that they were driven out, and Israeli "new historians" working in Israeli archives from the late 1980s found no evidence of a general Arab order to flee and much evidence of expulsions, massacres and fear. They still disagree about whether there was a master plan (the Israel piece sets out the positions of Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, Nur Masalha, Efraim Karsh and others). For Palestinians, the debate about intentions matters less than one fact on which almost all historians agree: when the war ended, Israel did not let the refugees come back, and their villages were levelled or settled by Jewish immigrants.

The ones who stayed and the ones who governed

About 156,000 Arabs remained inside Israel and became citizens (Part 7). Of the rest of Mandate Palestine, Egypt held the Gaza Strip and Transjordan the West Bank and East Jerusalem. On 22 September 1948 an All-Palestine Government was proclaimed in Egyptian-held Gaza, under the nominal presidency of Haj Amin and with Ahmed Hilmi Pasha as prime minister; recognised by most Arab League members but not by Transjordan, it had no real power and faded away, until Nasser formally dissolved it in 1959. On 1 December 1948, at a conference in Jericho, West Bank notables called for union with Transjordan under King Abdullah. No Palestinian Arab state was created.

Figures as summarised in the Israel piece and in standard scholarly sources; the Gaza refugee figure is approximate.

In thousands of Palestinian homes from Shatila to Santiago, a large iron key hangs on the wall: the key to a house in a village that no longer exists. It is the Nakba's most common heirloom, and its most stubborn argument.

Part 5 — Refugees, UNRWA, and Jordanian and Egyptian rule (1948–1967)

Tents, then concrete

The refugees of 1948 went wherever the war pushed them: across the hills to the West Bank, down the coast to Gaza, north into Lebanon and Syria, east across the river to Transjordan. At first they lived in tents, caves, mosques, schools and orange-packing sheds. Over the 1950s the tents of the camps were replaced with concrete-block rooms, and the camps became neighbourhoods, crowded, poor and political, with names that every Palestinian knows: Jabalia and Shati in Gaza, Balata near Nablus, Dheisheh near Bethlehem, Ein al-Hilweh and Shatila in Lebanon, Yarmouk in Damascus.

Families often rebuilt their villages inside the camps, settling street by street with former neighbours, and children learned to answer the question "where are you from?" with the name of a village they had never seen.

UNRWA

In December 1949 the UN General Assembly created the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which began work in 1950 with about 750,000 refugees on its books. It was meant to be temporary. It became, in effect, the welfare state of a stateless people: its schools educated generations of refugee children, its clinics vaccinated them, its ration cards fed them. Its definition of a refugee, someone whose normal residence was Palestine between 1 June 1946 and 15 May 1948 and who lost home and livelihood in the conflict, passes to descendants through the male line (see the Israel piece).

By its own figures, some 5.9 million Palestine refugees are now eligible for its services; nearly one-third, more than 1.5 million people, live in 58 recognised camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

UNRWA is one of the most fought-over institutions in the conflict:

• Palestinians and its defenders see it as the guarantee of the refugees' status and of their claim to return, and as an essential provider of services that host states and the Palestinian Authority could not replace.
• Israel and its critics argue that by registering descendants as refugees, it perpetuates the conflict rather than resettling people, that its textbooks and staff have spread hostility to Israel, and that some of its staff have been members of armed groups. In January 2024 Israel accused a dozen UNRWA employees of taking part in the 7 October attack. A UN internal investigation reported in August 2024 that, for nine staff members, the evidence could indicate they "may have been involved", and UNRWA ended their contracts. An independent review led by the former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna (April 2024) found that UNRWA had "robust" procedures to protect its neutrality but gaps in applying them, and that Israel had not yet provided evidence for its wider claims about staff membership of armed groups.

In October 2024 the Knesset passed laws, by large majorities, barring UNRWA from operating in Israel and banning official contact with it; they took effect in early 2025. On 22 October 2025, in an advisory opinion requested by the General Assembly, the International Court of Justice found by ten votes to one that Israel, as an occupying power, had an obligation to "agree to and facilitate by all means at its disposal relief schemes" for the population, "including relief provided by the United Nations and its entities, in particular" UNRWA, "and not to impede such relief". Israel's Foreign Ministry called the opinion "entirely predictable" and "another political attempt to impose political measures" against Israel "under the guise of 'International Law'", saying that UNRWA "still employs more than 1,400 Hamas operatives". On 5 December 2025 the General Assembly extended UNRWA's mandate to 30 June 2029, by 151 votes to 10, with 14 abstentions, and condemned "the killing and injury of its personnel, including over 300 staff members".

Three host countries, three different lives

Where a refugee family landed decided much of what followed.

The Jordanian West Bank (1948–1967)

On 24 April 1950 Jordan formally annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Almost no state recognised it (Britain and Iraq did, and possibly Pakistan; the Arab League treated Jordan as a temporary trustee). The annexation, with the refugees who crossed the river, roughly tripled Jordan's population, and West Bank Palestinians received half the seats in its parliament.

For many Palestinians, Jordanian rule meant citizenship, passports and a stake in a state; for others, it meant the absorption of the Palestinian cause into the Hashemite monarchy, which suppressed independent Palestinian organisations. On 20 July 1951 King Abdullah was shot dead at the entrance to the al-Aqsa Mosque by a Palestinian gunman, at a time when many Palestinians resented the annexation and rumours of his contacts with Israel. In the 1950s and 1960s many West Bankers moved to Amman and to the oil states of the Gulf. Jordan would finally renounce its claim to the West Bank on 31 July 1988.

Egyptian Gaza (1948–1967)

The Gaza Strip, a coastal sliver about 40 kilometres long, took in over 200,000 refugees, roughly a quarter of all who fled, on top of its own population. Egypt administered it through a military governor and kept the All-Palestine Government as a symbol until 1959. Gaza became the seedbed of Palestinian activism: young refugees joined the Muslim Brotherhood, communist cells and Nasserist groups, and from the early 1950s armed infiltrators, the fedayeen, crossed into Israel, provoking heavy Israeli reprisal raids.

In November 1956, during the Suez war, Israel occupied Gaza for four months. In Khan Younis on 3 November 1956, Israeli soldiers searching for fedayeen killed large numbers of men; a special report by the director of UNRWA cited lists of 275 people "allegedly killed", and a further 111 were reported killed in Rafah days later. Israeli authorities said their troops had met armed resistance. Most Israelis have never heard of these killings; most Gazans have never forgotten them.

For nineteen years, from 1948 to 1967, the West Bank and Gaza were ruled by Arab states, not by Israel, and no Palestinian state was created on them. Israelis often point this out. Palestinians reply that they were never asked.

Part 6 — The PLO, Fatah and the diaspora (1959–1993)

"Palestinians must free themselves"

In the late 1950s a group of young refugees who had studied in Cairo or Beirut and were working as engineers and teachers in Kuwait, among them Yasser Arafat, Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad) and Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), founded Fatah, the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, in about 1959. Its idea was simple and new: Palestinians should not wait for Arab armies to liberate their country, but take up the struggle themselves. Fatah marks the start of its armed struggle on 1 January 1965, when its armed wing tried to sabotage Israel's National Water Carrier.

Meanwhile, at a congress in East Jerusalem in May and June 1964, the Arab League sponsored the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), under Ahmad Shukeiri, a lawyer and diplomat. Its Palestinian National Charter, revised in 1968, declared that "Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine" (Article 9), and that "The partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of the state of Israel are entirely illegal" (Article 19). Palestinians saw these as statements of a people's refusal to accept dispossession; Israelis saw a charter for the destruction of their state. In April 1996, after Oslo, the Palestinian National Council voted by 504 to 54 to cancel the articles contrary to the PLO's recognition of Israel, though exactly which articles were cancelled remained disputed until 1998.

Karameh and the rise of the fedayeen

The defeat of the Arab armies in June 1967, which Palestinians call the Naksa, "the setback", discredited the Arab regimes and opened the way for the guerrilla groups. On 21 March 1968 Israeli forces raided the Fatah base at Karameh in Jordan. Fatah fighters and the Jordanian army resisted; the Israelis inflicted far heavier losses than they suffered (estimates of Palestinian dead range from about 100 to 200, against about 30 Israeli soldiers) but withdrew, leaving behind damaged vehicles and tanks that Jordan paraded through Amman. Karameh means "dignity" in Arabic, and Palestinians celebrated it as the first victory over the Israeli army. Thousands of volunteers joined the groups. In February 1969 Arafat was elected chairman of the PLO, which became an umbrella for the factions:

The 1970s were the decade in which the world met the Palestinians through hijacked airliners and attacks on civilians, from the PFLP's hijackings to Dawson's Field in Jordan in September 1970 to the killing of Israeli athletes at Munich in 1972 (see the Israel piece). Israel, the United States and many others called the PLO a terrorist organisation; Palestinians called its fighters fedayeen, "those who sacrifice themselves", and its dead shuhada, martyrs. Both labels have stuck to the same people ever since.

Jordan, Lebanon, Tunis

The fedayeen's armed presence turned Jordan into a state within a state. In September 1970, Black September, King Hussein's army attacked the guerrillas and drove them from the kingdom by mid-1971. The PLO moved to Lebanon, where a 1969 Cairo Agreement had already given it control of the refugee camps and the right to operate from the south. In Lebanon it built hospitals, a research centre, newspapers and militias, and was drawn into the country's civil war from 1975. In August 1976, Christian militias overran the besieged Tel al-Zaatar camp in Beirut and killed many of its inhabitants. In 1982 Israel invaded, besieged West Beirut, and some 8,000 PLO fighters were evacuated to Tunisia and elsewhere; weeks later came the massacre at Sabra and Shatila (see the Israel piece). In Tunis, the PLO was far from Palestine. In October 1985 Israeli jets bombed its headquarters there, and on 16 April 1988 Israeli commandos killed Abu Jihad at his home in Tunis.

From the gun to the olive branch

The PLO's diplomatic rise was as striking as its military failures. In October 1974 an Arab League summit in Rabat proclaimed it "the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people". On 13 November 1974 Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly, saying, in a widely quoted translation: "Today I have come bearing an olive branch in one hand and a freedom fighter's rifle in another. Do not let the green branch fall from my hand." On 22 November the Assembly recognised the Palestinian people's right to self-determination and gave the PLO observer status (Resolutions 3236 and 3237).

Slowly, through the 1970s and 1980s, the mainstream of the PLO moved from the goal of liberating all of Palestine towards a state in the West Bank and Gaza. On 15 November 1988, in Algiers, the Palestinian National Council proclaimed the State of Palestine, in a declaration written by Mahmoud Darwish, and accepted UN resolutions that implied recognition of Israel. Israelis were sceptical then and many remain so: they note that the PLO's armed factions kept attacking, and argue that the phased approach was a tactic, not a change of heart.

The diaspora

Today, by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), there are about 15.5 million Palestinians in the world (end of 2025): about 5.56 million in the West Bank and Gaza, about 1.86 million inside Israel, and the rest, roughly 8 million, in exile, about 6.8 million of them in Arab countries. (The PCBS's own release gives a slightly higher diaspora total than its components add up to.)

A Palestinian in Santiago, a Palestinian in Kuwait in 1985 and a Palestinian in Shatila share a name, a cuisine and a memory. They have almost never shared a government.

Part 7 — Palestinian citizens of Israel (1948–2026)

The ones who stayed

The roughly 156,000 Arabs who remained inside Israel in 1949 became its citizens, voters and, from the first Knesset, members of parliament. They were also a defeated and frightened minority. About 46,000 of them, by a UNRWA estimate of 1950, had themselves been displaced from their villages and were not allowed back, even though they now lived a few kilometres away; Israeli law classed them as "present absentees" and their property passed to the state. Until 1966 most Arab citizens lived under military rule, needing permits to travel, while much of their land was expropriated. At Kafr Qasim, on 29 October 1956, Border Police killed 48 villagers returning from the fields (see the Israel piece).

Names and identity

What to call them is itself contested. The Israeli state and many Israeli Jews say "Arab citizens of Israel" or "Israeli Arabs"; many of the people themselves say "Palestinian citizens of Israel", or "the Arabs of '48". Most identify as Arab or Palestinian by nationality and Israeli by citizenship, in varying mixes. One survey in November 2023 asked which component of identity mattered most: 33 per cent said Israeli citizenship, 32 per cent Arab identity, 23 per cent religion and 8 per cent Palestinian identity, though focus groups in the same study suggested Palestinian identity was central. The Druze, whose men are conscripted into the army, and many Bedouin have historically identified more closely with the state.

They number about 2.1 million, about one in five Israelis, according to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics (2023). Most are Muslim, with Christian and Druze minorities. They live mainly in Galilee (Nazareth is their largest city), the "Triangle" of towns near the Green Line such as Umm al-Fahm, the mixed cities of Haifa, Jaffa, Lod, Ramle and Acre, and the Negev, where an estimated 90,000 Bedouin live in villages the state does not recognise and which often lack connections to water and electricity.

Land Day and October 2000

On 30 March 1976, Arab citizens held a general strike against a government plan to expropriate about 20,000 dunams (20 square kilometres) of land in Galilee, around Sakhnin and Arraba. Police and soldiers killed six Arab protesters. Land Day is marked every year by Palestinians everywhere.

In October 2000, at the start of the second intifada, demonstrations inside Israel turned into riots and clashes, and police killed 13 Arab protesters (12 citizens and one Gazan); one Israeli Jew was also killed. A state commission of inquiry, the Or Commission, found a pattern of government "prejudice and neglect" towards Arab citizens. No police officer was prosecuted.

Between two worlds

Arab citizens have made striking gains, as doctors and pharmacists (a large share of the country's), judges, academics, footballers and entrepreneurs. In 2021 the Islamist party Ra'am joined a governing coalition, a first for an independent Arab party. Yet they also describe discrimination in land, planning, housing and budgets; the 2018 Nation-State Law declared national self-determination in Israel "unique to the Jewish people" (see the Israel piece).

In recent years the greatest killer in Arab communities has been crime. By the count of the Abraham Initiatives, an Arab-Jewish civil society group, 244 Arab citizens were killed in 2023, 230 in 2024 and a record 252 in 2025; police figures for 2025 were slightly lower. Arab leaders blame police neglect and under-policing; the police and government blame criminal organisations.

After 7 October 2023, many Arab citizens were arrested or disciplined for social media posts, and many felt suspected from both sides: by Jewish Israelis, as a potential fifth column; by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, as too comfortable. In the general election of 27 October 2026, partial results put Arab-led parties on about 19 of the Knesset's 120 seats, a record, and Likud figures accused them of having "stolen" the election, a claim the Central Elections Committee rejected (see the Israel piece).

Arab citizens of Israel carry Israeli passports and Palestinian memories. In every war between Israel and the Palestinians since 1948, they have had relatives on the other side.

Part 8 — Occupation as daily life (1967–2026)

Under military government

In June 1967 Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza (see the Israel piece). About 280,000 to 325,000 Palestinians fled or were displaced, many of them refugees for the second time. Israel annexed East Jerusalem and its surroundings, giving Palestinian Jerusalemites permanent residency, not citizenship (they could apply for citizenship, and few did). The rest of the territory was placed under a military government, which from 1981 ran civilian matters through a Civil Administration. For people in the West Bank, the rules of daily life came from military orders, enforced by military courts.

What this has meant for ordinary Palestinians is described below with sources. Israel's position is that these measures are security responses to terrorism and lawful administration of territory whose final status has not been agreed; Palestinians and most international bodies regard them as the machinery of a prolonged occupation that the ICJ found unlawful in July 2024 (see the Israel piece).

Permits, IDs and checkpoints

Palestinians in the West Bank carry ID cards issued through the Israeli system, and travel to Jerusalem, Israel or abroad requires permits that can be refused or revoked, often on unstated security grounds. Before October 2023, well over 100,000 West Bank Palestinians held permits to work in Israel or in settlements; most of these permits were suspended after 7 October, a large blow to the West Bank economy.

Movement inside the West Bank is shaped by checkpoints, road gates, earth mounds and roadblocks. OCHA documented 925 movement obstacles across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as of December 2025 (fact sheet published April 2026, as reported). A journey from a village to the nearest city that takes twenty minutes on an open road can take hours when a gate is closed. Israel says the checkpoints stop attackers and weapons, and that many were introduced in response to waves of attacks.

The separation barrier, begun in 2002 during the second intifada, will be about 708 kilometres long when complete. About 85 per cent of its route runs inside the West Bank rather than on the Green Line, leaving about 9 per cent of West Bank land, and some 25,000 Palestinians, on the Israeli side. Israel credits it with ending suicide bombings; Palestinians call it the "apartheid wall". In 2004 the ICJ found its construction in occupied territory contrary to international law (see the Israel piece).

Land, building and demolitions

Under the Oslo II agreement of 1995, about 60 per cent of the West Bank, Area C, remained under full Israeli control, including most farmland, grazing land and land reserves. Palestinians in Area C and East Jerusalem must obtain Israeli building permits, which are rarely granted; homes, animal shelters, schools and water tanks built without them are demolished. In a single week in October 2026, OCHA reported that Israeli authorities demolished or forced Palestinians to demolish 22 structures "for lack of Israeli-issued building permits", displacing 37 people. Israel says it enforces planning law against illegal construction, as any state would.

Settlements and settlers

By the mid-2020s more than 500,000 Israelis lived in West Bank settlements outside East Jerusalem, and about 246,000 in East Jerusalem (see the Israel piece). In August 2025 Israel approved the long-frozen E1 plan of about 3,400 homes east of Jerusalem, which critics say would cut the West Bank in two; Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said it "buries the idea of a Palestinian state". The settlements are regarded as illegal under international law by the UN Security Council, the ICJ and most governments; Israel disputes this and says Jews have a right to live in Judea and Samaria, the heartland of their history.

Settler violence has become, for many Palestinian villages, the defining fear. OCHA counted a weekly average of 53 settler attacks causing casualties or property damage in 2026, and then, in October alone, 397 such incidents by the 26th of the month, the most in any month since its records began in 2006. Herding communities in the Jordan Valley and the hills south of Hebron have been emptied: a UN trade and development (UNCTAD) report in September 2026 counted 38 communities emptied of Palestinians since 2023. Israeli governments have condemned specific attacks and police have made arrests; Palestinians and Israeli rights groups say few attackers are ever charged, and that soldiers often stand by or join in.

Detention

Since 1967, by Palestinian estimates, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have passed through Israeli detention; in many families, every adult man has been arrested at some point. Military courts try West Bank Palestinians, while Israeli settlers living alongside them are tried in civilian courts. Thousands are held at any time in administrative detention, without charge or trial, on evidence they cannot see, which Israel says is necessary when sources cannot be revealed in court. Palestinians call those held asra, prisoners, and regard them as political prisoners; Israel calls them security prisoners, many of them convicted of violent attacks.

Apartheid?

Since 2021, the Israeli group B'Tselem, Human Rights Watch and, in 2022, Amnesty International have described Israel's rule over Palestinians as apartheid. In its July 2024 advisory opinion, the ICJ found that Israel's measures maintaining separation between settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem breach Article 3 of the UN convention against racial discrimination, which prohibits "racial segregation and apartheid", without saying which of the two; individual judges read the finding differently. Israel rejects the apartheid charge as a defamation, pointing to the equal citizenship of Arab Israelis and arguing that the West Bank's status results from an unresolved war, not from racial ideology.

"Occupation" in this history is not a slogan. It is a permit office, a closed gate, a demolition order on a goat shed, and a son who has been in detention for a year without being told why. For Israelis, it is also the checkpoint that stopped the bomber. Both are true at the same gate.

Part 9 — Intifadas, Oslo and the Palestinian Authority (1987–2006)

The first intifada, from below

The first intifada, "shaking off", broke out in December 1987 (see the Israel piece for its course and toll). What made it different from anything before was that it came from the society itself, not from the PLO in Tunis. Within weeks a Unified National Leadership of the Uprising, linking Fatah, the left and local activists, began issuing numbered leaflets (the first on 8 January 1988) that set strike days and boycotts. Neighbourhood committees organised food, medical care and underground classes when Israel closed the schools; women's committees, trade unions and student groups ran much of it. Palestinians boycotted Israeli goods, refused to pay taxes and resigned from posts in the Civil Administration. In the Christian town of Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem, residents' refusal to pay taxes in 1989 led the army to seize goods from homes and shops.

The image the world remembers is of boys throwing stones at soldiers; the image many Palestinians remember is of whole towns, for a few years, governing themselves. Israel deployed some 80,000 soldiers and answered with live fire, beatings, mass arrests and curfews. The uprising also turned on itself: an estimated 822 Palestinians were killed by other Palestinians as alleged collaborators between 1988 and April 1994.

Oslo, as Palestinians lived it

At the Madrid conference of 1991, Palestinians from the occupied territories, among them the Gaza doctor Haidar Abdel-Shafi and the academic Hanan Ashrawi, spoke for their people to the world. Then came the secret talks in Norway and the handshake on the White House lawn on 13 September 1993 (see the Israel piece). In July 1994 Arafat returned from exile to Gaza to crowds in the streets. For a few years Palestinians had something they had never had: their own police, ministries, passports, a flag, stamps, and in January 1996 elections, in which Arafat won 88 per cent of the vote for president and Fatah dominated the 88-seat Legislative Council; Hamas boycotted.

But the promised state did not come. The interim period stretched on; settlements kept growing; Israel's closure of the territories after suicide bombings cut workers off from jobs; the West Bank was divided into Areas A, B and C, with Palestinian cities as islands in Israeli-controlled land. Arafat's Palestinian Authority (PA) became known for corruption, patronage and a dozen overlapping security services; critics in Palestinian society, from human rights groups to students, were arrested. Many Palestinians concluded that Oslo had given them responsibility without sovereignty. Israelis, for their part, concluded that land handed to the PA had become a base for the bombers who blew up buses in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and that Arafat had never truly abandoned violence.

Oslo gave Palestinians a flag, a police force and an elected president. It did not give them a border, a capital or an end to settlement building, and for most Palestinians that became the measure of it.

The second intifada

After the Camp David summit failed in July 2000 and Ariel Sharon visited the Haram al-Sharif in September, the second, al-Aqsa intifada began (see the Israel piece). It was a war, not a civil uprising. Palestinian groups, among them Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah's own al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, carried out suicide bombings and shootings that killed about 1,000 Israelis, most of them civilians; on 27 March 2002 a Hamas bomber killed 30 people at a Passover meal at the Park Hotel in Netanya. Israel reoccupied the West Bank cities in Operation Defensive Shield from 29 March 2002. In the battle for Jenin refugee camp in April, 52 Palestinians were killed (Israel said most were militants; Human Rights Watch counted 22 civilians) and 23 Israeli soldiers. Between about 3,200 and 3,350 Palestinians were killed in the intifada as a whole.

Palestinian society paid in curfews, sieges, demolished homes, thousands of prisoners, and economic collapse. Many Palestinians, including some of the uprising's own leaders, later called the militarisation of the intifada a catastrophic mistake, one that destroyed the Israeli peace camp and the Palestinian economy without bringing a state any closer. Others still see the armed struggle as legitimate resistance to an occupation that negotiations had failed to end.

Arafat spent his last years besieged by the Israeli army in his compound, the Muqata, in Ramallah. He died in a French military hospital near Paris on 11 November 2004, and was buried in Ramallah. Mahmoud Abbas, a long-time critic of the armed intifada, won the presidential election of January 2005 with 62.5 per cent of all votes cast (67.4 per cent of valid votes). The most popular Fatah leader of the younger generation, Marwan Barghouti, was in an Israeli prison: arrested in April 2002, he was convicted in 2004 on five counts of murder and sentenced to five life terms plus 40 years; he refused to recognise the court and denied the charges. He has been there ever since.

Part 10 — Hamas, the 2006 election and the split (1987–2023)

From charity to movement

Hamas, the Arabic acronym of the Islamic Resistance Movement (the word also means "zeal"), grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza. In 1973 the wheelchair-bound preacher Sheikh Ahmed Yassin founded an Islamic charity, the Mujama al-Islami, which ran mosques, clinics, kindergartens and sports clubs; several former Israeli officials later said Israel tolerated or even helped fund it as a counterweight to the secular PLO. In December 1987, days into the first intifada, the Brotherhood in Gaza took the name Hamas and joined the uprising. Unlike Fatah, it never joined the PLO.

Its founding charter, signed on 18 August 1988, is quoted here because it matters to how Israelis see the movement. It describes Palestine as "an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day" (Article 11), says that "There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad" (Article 13), quotes a hadith saying the Day of Judgement will not come "until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews)" (Article 7), and cites the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Article 32).

In 2017 Hamas issued a Document of General Principles and Policies. It states that "its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion" (paragraph 16), that "There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity" (19), and that while it "rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea", it considers a "fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967", with the return of the refugees, "to be a formula of national consensus" (20). It calls armed resistance "the strategic choice" (25). Hamas leaders described the 1988 charter as a historical document but did not formally revoke it.

Through the 1990s and 2000s Hamas's suicide bombings did more than anything else to turn Israelis against Oslo. Israel killed its leaders in turn: Yassin was killed by a helicopter missile in Gaza on 22 March 2004.

The election of 2006

On 25 January 2006, in elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council, Hamas's Change and Reform list won 44.45 per cent of the national list vote and 74 of the 132 seats; Fatah won 41.43 per cent and 45 seats. Turnout was about three-quarters. European Union observers found "nothing which would indicate that the final result was not the outcome chosen by the voters". Many Palestinians had voted against Fatah's corruption and failure as much as for Hamas's programme.

Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas became prime minister. Israel, the United States and the EU declared they would not deal with a Hamas government unless it recognised Israel, renounced violence and accepted past agreements; aid was suspended and Israel withheld the tax revenues it collected for the PA (see the Israel piece). Fighting between Hamas and Fatah grew. A unity government formed after the Mecca Agreement of 8 February 2007 lasted three months.

The split

In the battle of Gaza, 7–15 June 2007, Hamas fighters overran the Fatah-dominated security forces; the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights counted at least 161 people killed. Abbas dismissed the Hamas government and appointed the economist Salam Fayyad prime minister in Ramallah. Since then there have been, in effect, two Palestinian administrations: Fatah and the PA in the West Bank cities, Hamas in Gaza. No national election has been held since 2006: elections called for 2021 were postponed on 29 April 2021, with Abbas citing Israel's refusal to allow voting in East Jerusalem. Reconciliation deals, the most recent signed by 14 factions in Beijing on 23 July 2024, have not been carried out.

Hamas in Gaza, 2007–2023

Hamas built a government in Gaza with ministries, police and courts, paid for by taxes, by smuggling through tunnels under the Egyptian border, and later by Qatari-funded payments. Under the Israeli and Egyptian blockade (see the Israel piece), Gaza's economy shrank, electricity ran for a few hours a day, and most young people could not leave. Four wars, in 2008–09, 2012, 2014 and 2021, killed thousands of Gazans and about a hundred people in Israel (see the Israel piece).

Under both governments, dissent was dangerous. In a 2018 report, Two Authorities, One Way, Zero Dissent, Human Rights Watch documented arbitrary arrests and torture of critics by the PA in the West Bank and by Hamas in Gaza; both rejected its findings. In 2019 Gazans protesting tax increases under the slogan "We want to live" were beaten and arrested by Hamas security forces.

The Great March of Return, from 30 March 2018 to the end of 2019, brought tens of thousands of Gazans to the border fence each Friday to demand the right of return and an end to the blockade. Israeli fire killed at least 189 people by the end of 2018, by the count of a UN commission of inquiry, which found that at least 29 of them were members of armed groups and that the shootings "may have constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity". Israel said Hamas used the protests as cover for attacks and attempts to breach the fence, and rejected the report.

By 2023, a Palestinian of thirty in Gaza had never voted, had probably never left the Strip, and had lived through four wars. A Palestinian of thirty in Ramallah had never voted either.

Part 11 — 7 October and the Gaza war, from Palestinian society's side (2023–2026)

The attack

The Israel piece describes the attack of 7 October 2023 in detail: about 1,200 people killed in Israel, most of them civilians, killings of families in their homes and at the Nova festival, and 251 people taken into Gaza as hostages. For Israelis it was the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust; Israel, the US, the EU, the UK and many other governments call it terrorism. Hamas called it a response to the occupation, the blockade and threats to al-Aqsa.

How Palestinians saw the attack, in the weeks that followed, was measured by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) in Ramallah. In its poll of 22 November to 2 December 2023, 72 per cent of respondents said Hamas's decision to launch the attack was "correct" (82 per cent in the West Bank, 57 per cent in Gaza). More than 90 per cent said they believed Hamas fighters had not committed the atrocities shown in videos, which most had not seen, and a majority said that attacking civilians in their homes was not permissible. The pollsters read the result as support for a blow against occupation rather than for killing civilians; many Israelis read it as support for the massacre itself. By August 2026, PCPSR found satisfaction with Hamas's conduct of the war down to 42 per cent, from 60 per cent in an earlier poll.

The war, as Gazans lived it

The war that followed was the most destructive in Palestinian history (the Israel piece gives the figures, sources and court cases). For Gaza's 2.1 million people it meant:

The Gaza ministry, which operates under the Hamas-run authorities, does not distinguish civilians from fighters; Israel says it has killed many thousands of Hamas fighters and that Hamas fought from tunnels, homes, schools and hospitals and used civilians as shields. Hamas and Palestinian survivors describe a population with nowhere safe to go, ordered repeatedly from north to south and back.

Almost everyone was displaced, many families again and again, into tents and classrooms. In May 2025 an Israeli- and American-backed private group, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, began distributing food from a few fortified sites; the UN human rights office counted at least 1,373 Palestinians killed while seeking food between 27 May and 31 July, 859 of them near the foundation's sites. The foundation denied that its operations caused the deaths. In August 2025 the UN-backed IPC declared famine in Gaza Governorate, which Israel disputed (see the Israel piece).

The words for all this are themselves contested. Palestinians, South Africa in its case at the ICJ, and a UN Commission of Inquiry (September 2025) have called Israel's conduct genocide; Israel "categorically rejected" the commission's report as "distorted and false", and the ICJ case has not been decided (see the Israel piece). Gazans call their dead shuhada, martyrs, a word used in Arabic for anyone killed in war or by an enemy, not only fighters.

Gaza's writers and journalists became its chroniclers, and many were killed. The Committee to Protect Journalists counted roughly 250 journalists and media workers killed in the region by mid-2026, after removing from its list a number who it found had taken part in combat. The poet and teacher Refaat Alareer was killed in an airstrike on 6 December 2023; his poem "If I Must Die" was read around the world. The poet Mosab Abu Toha, who was detained by Israeli soldiers while fleeing with his family in 2023, won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for commentary for his essays in The New Yorker. The Voice of Hind Rajab, a film about a six-year-old girl killed in Gaza in January 2024, won the Silver Lion at Venice in 2025.

Ceasefire without peace

Under the US plan, a ceasefire took effect on 10 October 2025, and the last living hostages were exchanged for about 1,968 Palestinian prisoners and detainees (see the Israel piece). Families in the West Bank and Gaza celebrated the return of sons and fathers; Israelis noted that some of those released had been convicted of murder. In the days after the ceasefire, Hamas gunmen publicly executed men they accused of collaborating with Israel; the PA called the killings "heinous", and the Gaza rights group Al Mezan called them extrajudicial executions.

A year later, Israeli forces held a large part of Gaza behind the "yellow line"; Hamas had announced on 6 July 2026 that its civilian administration would resign in favour of a technocratic National Committee for the Administration of Gaza endorsed by the UN Security Council, but it had not disarmed. OCHA reported in late October 2026 that respiratory infections accounted for 60 per cent of medical consultations as families faced another winter under plastic sheeting.

In Gaza in 2026 the question is no longer who rules. It is where to sleep, how to find clean water, and whether the rubble will ever be cleared.

Part 12 — Statehood, the economy and the present (1974–2026)

The long road at the UN

By September 2025, 157 of the 193 UN member states recognised the State of Palestine (Wikipedia's tally, matched by Full Fact's tracker updated 28 May 2026). This history found no further recognitions in 2026 up to the end of October; Japan and Italy have indicated that they would recognise once conditions are met. The United States, Germany and Israel's other close allies do not. Recognition gave Palestinians embassies, symbolism and legal standing; it did not move a single checkpoint.

The economy

Palestinian economic life has always depended on Israel: the 1994 Paris Protocol put the territories in a customs union with Israel, which collects import duties and taxes on the PA's behalf and transfers them monthly as "clearance revenues", more than two-thirds of the PA's income. Israel has repeatedly withheld these funds, partly in response to the PA's payments to prisoners and families of those killed, which Israel calls "pay-for-slay" and Palestinians call social support for families. UNCTAD counted $3.67 billion withheld or deducted between January 2019 and March 2026, and reported that transfers were stopped entirely from May 2025 into 2026, leaving the PA unable to pay full salaries.

In February 2025 Abbas issued a decree moving prisoner payments to a needs-based welfare system. The US State Department called the change a "deception" and reported in April 2026 that the payments continued "under a different name"; Israel says the policy is unchanged.

Politics in late 2026

Mahmoud Abbas, born in 1935, has been president since 2005; his elected term expired in 2009. In April 2025 he appointed Hussein al-Sheikh, who for eighteen years had headed the PA's civil affairs authority, which deals with Israel over permits, as the State of Palestine's first vice-president; many Palestinians see him as too close to Israel. On 9 July 2026 he set elections for an enlarged, 200-seat Legislative Council for 28 November 2026; on 9 October he postponed them to 11 September 2027, alongside a presidential vote, with the PLO leadership saying that conditions were "not conducive" because Israel had not allowed election materials or observers into Gaza. Israel's foreign minister, Gideon Sa'ar, called this "yet another ridiculous lie"; Hamas called the postponement "a step in the right direction".

PCPSR's poll of 5–8 August 2026 (1,270 respondents, margin of error 3.5 points) caught the mood:

At Fatah's congress in May 2026 Barghouti, still in prison, was re-elected to the movement's Central Committee with the most votes of any candidate. Israel refused to release him in the 2011 and 2025 exchanges, and regards him as a convicted murderer; some of his supporters call him the Palestinian Mandela.

Part 13 — Culture: poems, stitches, songs and food

The poets

No people has leaned on poetry quite as Palestinians have. Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008) was born in al-Birwa in Galilee, a village destroyed in 1948; his family fled to Lebanon and came back as "present absentees". In 1964 he wrote "Identity Card", with its refrain "Write down: I am an Arab", addressed to an Israeli official; he read it to a crowd in Nazareth in 1965. He went into exile, joined the PLO, wrote the 1988 Declaration of Independence, and resigned from the PLO executive over Oslo. Late in life he called the fighting between Fatah and Hamas "a suicide attempt in the streets". He died in Houston on 9 August 2008 and is buried in Ramallah.

Fadwa Tuqan of Nablus, "the poet of Palestine", wrote of women's lives and occupation. Ghassan Kanafani (1936–1972), born in Acre, wrote the novella Men in the Sun (1962), in which three refugees try to cross the desert to Kuwait hidden in an empty water tank, and die there without anyone hearing them; it became the parable of a people dying quietly. Kanafani was also the spokesman of the PFLP. He was killed with his teenage niece, Lamees, by a car bomb in Beirut on 8 July 1972, which is widely attributed to Israel's Mossad.

Pictures and ideas

The cartoonist Naji al-Ali drew Handala, a barefoot ten-year-old refugee boy who first appeared in 1969, turned his back to the viewer from 1973, and became the most recognised image of Palestinian refugeehood. Al-Ali was shot in London on 22 July 1987 and died five weeks later. Edward Said (1935–2003), born in Jerusalem and a professor at Columbia, wrote Orientalism (1978), one of the most influential books of modern scholarship, and The Question of Palestine. The painter Sliman Mansour (1947–2026), who died in August 2026, painted women in village dress and tree-filled landscapes, and became the artist of sumud, steadfastness. The Palestinian Museum in Birzeit, opened in 2016, holds the national story in a hillside building among terraces.

Stitches, songs and screens

Food

Palestinian cooking is the food of the olive and the wheat field: musakhan, taboon bread soaked in olive oil and covered with onions, sumac and roast chicken, traditionally made when the new oil is pressed; maqluba, "upside down", rice, meat and fried vegetables turned out of the pot at the table; knafeh from Nablus; za'atar and oil for breakfast. Israelis and Palestinians also argue over who owns hummus and falafel, dishes shared across the Levant.

A Palestinian grandmother who cannot return to her village can still embroider its pattern on a dress and cook its dish on a feast day. Culture has been the one homeland nobody could take away.

Part 14 — How to understand Palestine today

Voices

A refugee in Lebanon. My grandfather came from a village near Acre in 1948. We still live in the camp, we cannot own property, and we are barred from many jobs. The world talks about a state in the West Bank, but what about us?

A farmer near Nablus. The olive trees are my family's. I need permission to reach some of them, and settlers have burned others. The Palestinian Authority does not protect me, and Israel does not want me here. I am staying.

A woman in Gaza. I have lost my home, my brothers and my children's school. I did not choose 7 October or Hamas's government, and I did not choose the bombs. I want my children to live.

A Palestinian citizen of Israel. I am a doctor in an Israeli hospital. I treat Jewish and Arab patients. My cousins are refugees in Syria. I am trusted at work and suspected at the airport.

An Israeli reading this history. I see the suffering, but this account must also remember the suicide bombings, the rockets, the charter, and 7 October. Every time we left land, from southern Lebanon to Gaza, it was used to attack us. I want to know who will guarantee that a Palestinian state is not a base for the next war.

Five ideas to keep in mind

1. A people before a state. Palestinians have a national identity without ever having had full sovereignty; their history is one of institutions in exile.
2. 1948 is not the past. For most Palestinians the refugee question, the keys and the villages are present-day facts, not history.
3. Divided geography, divided politics. Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Israel and the diaspora have lived under different rulers since 1948, and since 2007 under rival Palestinian governments.
4. Two traumas, one land. Israelis' fear and Palestinians' dispossession feed each other; each side's security measures are the other's grievance.
5. Words are positions. Occupation, disputed, terrorism, resistance, martyr, apartheid, genocide: each word carries a judgment, and people of good faith use different ones.

Key dates

Who's who

Palestinians have spent more than seventy-five years being told to wait: for the Arab armies, for the UN, for Oslo, for the next election. The olive trees, at least, keep their own calendar.

The takeaway

Palestinian history is the story of an Arab people of farmers, merchants and townspeople who became a nation in the same decades that another people built a state on the same land. In 1948 most of them lost their homes; since then they have lived as refugees, as citizens of Israel, under Jordanian, Egyptian and Israeli rule, and in a diaspora that reaches from Kuwait to Chile. They built a national movement in exile, fought, negotiated, won recognition from most of the world, and divided against themselves. Israelis remember the same century through the Holocaust, the wars and the terror attacks, and both memories are real. In late 2026 Palestinians have a flag, embassies and 157 recognitions, but no sovereignty, no elected leadership, and, in Gaza, barely a roof.

Try this: Read the Israel piece and this one side by side, and pick a single year, 1948, 1967, 1993, 2000 or 2023. Write one paragraph describing it as an Israeli family would and one as a Palestinian family would, without using any of the contested words in Part 14's fifth idea. Then decide which words you need to add back, and notice what each one changes.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources

• Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Palestinians at the End of 2025 (press release, December 2025).
• UN OCHA occupied Palestinian territory: Humanitarian Situation Reports (22 and 29 October 2026); West Bank monthly snapshot (September 2026); Gaza reported impact snapshot (28 October 2026).
• UNRWA, "Palestine refugees" and camp profiles (2026); UN General Assembly, press summary of 5 December 2025.
• International Court of Justice, advisory opinions of 19 July 2024 and 22 October 2025; Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs response, 22 October 2025.
• UN OHCHR, statement on killings of people seeking aid in Gaza (1 August 2025).
• UNCTAD, report on assistance to the Palestinian people, press release of 24 September 2026; World Bank, World Development Indicators (West Bank and Gaza), updated October 2026.
• Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, Public Opinion Polls No. 90 (December 2023) and No. 97 (August 2026).
• Hamas Covenant (1988), Avalon Project, Yale Law School; Hamas, A Document of General Principles and Policies (2017), full text as published by Middle East Eye; Palestinian National Charter (1968), Avalon Project.
• Human Rights Watch, Two Authorities, One Way, Zero Dissent (2018) and A Threshold Crossed (2021); Amnesty International (2022); B'Tselem (2021).
• UN Commission of Inquiry on the 2018 Gaza protests (2019).
• AP and WAFA (10 October 2026), The National (July 2026), Al Jazeera (20 October 2026), and Times of Israel/TPS reporting as cited in the text.
• Wikipedia articles on the people, places and events named, used for background and cross-checking.

Go deeper

• 📘 Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine (2020). A Palestinian historian's account of the conflict as settler colonialism, drawing on his own family's papers; Israeli critics dispute its framing.
• 📘 Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (1997). The classic study of how a national identity formed before 1948.
• 📘 Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (1995). Ottoman Palestine from its own archives.
• 📘 Walid Khalidi (ed.), All That Remains (1992). The villages depopulated in 1948, one by one.
• 📘 Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004). The Israeli historian's documentary study of 1948.
• 📘 Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree (2006). One house in Ramla, one Palestinian family and one Israeli family.
• 📘 Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems; Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories.
• 🌐 UN OCHA, occupied Palestinian territory: weekly figures on Gaza and the West Bank.
• 🌐 Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research: the longest-running Palestinian opinion polls.
• 🌐 Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics: population and economic data.
• 🌐 UNRWA: the refugee agency's figures and camp profiles.
• 🌐 The Avalon Project, Yale Law School: full texts of the PLO and Hamas charters and other founding documents.
• 🎧 The oud recordings of Le Trio Joubran; the hip-hop of DAM; Mohammed Assaf's Arab Idol performances (2013).
• ▶️ No Other Land (2024, documentary); Elia Suleiman, Divine Intervention (2002); Kaouther Ben Hania, The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025).

Related pieces in this library: A Brief History of Israel: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Land Both Call Home; Islam: From Mecca to Two Billion People; Judaism: A People, a Covenant and a Conversation Across 3,000 Years; Christianity: From a Galilean Teacher to More Than Two Billion People; A Brief History of Saudi Arabia: Incense Roads, the Prophet's Cities, a Desert Dynasty and the Oil Age; A Brief History of Iran: Empire, Faith, Revolution, and the Long Argument over Who Rules.