The history of Palestine

Palestine is the name of a historic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and of the State of Palestine, which claims the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. The land saw some of the world's first farming villages, was home to Canaanites, Philistines, Israelites and Judaeans, and passed through the hands of Egyptian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk and Ottoman rulers. In the twentieth century, British rule, Zionist settlement and Arab nationalism collided, and the war of 1948 created the State of Israel and scattered most of Palestine's Arab population. The Palestinian struggle for statehood since then, through occupation, uprisings, the Oslo peace process and repeated wars in Gaza, remains one of the most contested questions in world politics. For the history of the same land from the Israeli side, see History of Israel.

The southern Levant was one of the corridors through which early humans left Africa, and stone tools at Ubeidiya in the Jordan Valley are around 1.5 million years old. Neanderthals and modern humans both lived in the caves of Mount Carmel. Around 12,500 BCE the Natufian culture appeared, its people gathering wild cereals and living in semi-permanent settlements, and their descendants became some of the first farmers of the Neolithic Revolution. Jericho, in what is now the West Bank, had a stone wall and tower by about 8000 BCE and is often counted among the oldest continuously inhabited towns on earth.

In the Bronze Age the land was known as Canaan, a patchwork of walled city-states such as Megiddo, Hazor and Gezer that traded with Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt. After about 1450 BCE the pharaohs of the New Kingdom ruled Canaan as a province, and the Amarna letters of the fourteenth century BCE record its local rulers pleading for Egyptian help. Egyptian control faded during the Late Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BCE, when the Philistines, a people of Aegean origin, settled the southern coast at Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron and Gath. The Greek name Palaistinē, used by Herodotus, derives from them.

In the hill country of the interior, the kingdoms of Israel and Judah emerged in the Iron Age, while the northern coast belonged to the cities of Phoenicia. The religion of Israel and Judah developed into Judaism, with Jerusalem and its Temple at its centre. Assyria destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel around 720 BCE, and in 586 BCE Babylonia under Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed Jerusalem and deported much of Judah's elite.

Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid Empire conquered Babylon in 539 BCE and allowed exiles to return, and a Second Temple was built in Jerusalem. Alexander the Great took the region in 332 BCE, besieging Gaza on his way to Egypt. His successors fought over it: the Ptolemaic Kingdom ruled first, then the Seleucid Empire from 200 BCE. A Seleucid attempt to suppress Jewish worship provoked the Maccabean revolt of 167 BCE and an independent Hasmonean kingdom, which Rome brought under its control in 63 BCE.

Under the Roman Empire, the client king Herod rebuilt the Temple on a vast scale, and Jesus preached in Galilee and was crucified in Jerusalem around 30 CE. Two great Jewish revolts were crushed: in 70 CE the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the Second Temple, and after the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132 to 135 Hadrian refounded the city as Aelia Capitolina, barred Jews from it, and renamed the province Syria Palaestina.

After Constantine I embraced Christianity, Palestine became the Christian Holy Land. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem were built in the fourth century, monasteries filled the Judaean desert, and pilgrims arrived from across the empire. Under the Byzantine Empire the region was divided into several provinces called Palaestina, its population mostly Christian with Jewish and Samaritan communities. The Persian Sasanian Empire seized Jerusalem in 614, but Emperor Heraclius recovered it by 630.

Within a few years of the death of Muhammad, Arab armies of the Rashidun Caliphate defeated the Byzantines at the Yarmuk in 636, and Jerusalem surrendered to Caliph Umar around 637. The region became the military district of Jund Filastin. Under the Umayyad Caliphate, Abd al-Malik built the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem in about 691, and the new town of Ramla became the provincial capital. Jerusalem, al-Quds in Arabic, became the third holiest city of Islam. Over the following centuries, under the Abbasid Caliphate, the Fatimid Caliphate and briefly the Seljuks, the population gradually became Arabic-speaking and mostly Muslim, while Christian and Jewish communities remained.

The First Crusade captured Jerusalem in 1099 and massacred much of its Muslim and Jewish population, founding the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Crusades brought nearly two centuries of war. Saladin defeated the Crusader army at Hattin in 1187 and retook Jerusalem, though the Crusaders held parts of the coast for another century. In 1260 the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt halted the Mongol Empire at Ain Jalut in the Jezreel Valley, and in 1291 it took Acre, the last Crusader stronghold. Mamluk rule from Cairo lasted more than two centuries.

After Selim I defeated the Mamluks in 1516, Palestine became part of the Ottoman Empire, divided into districts such as Jerusalem, Gaza, Nablus and Safad within the province of Damascus. Suleiman the Magnificent built the walls that still surround Jerusalem's Old City. Society was mainly rural, made up of peasant villages, Bedouin tribes and towns run by notable families.

From the seventeenth century local powers grew strong. In the eighteenth century Daher al-Umar built an autonomous domain in Galilee based at Acre, financed by the cotton trade, and his successor Jazzar Pasha repelled Napoleon at Acre in 1799. Egypt's Muhammad Ali occupied the region from 1831 to 1840, crushing a major peasant revolt in 1834. After the Ottomans returned, the Tanzimat reforms centralised government, and in the 1870s Jerusalem became a district answering directly to Istanbul. Arab towns grew, newspapers such as Falastin, founded in 1911, spread a sense of Palestinian identity, and from 1882 Jewish immigrants from Europe began arriving under the Zionist movement, prompting the first Arab protests against land sales.

During World War I, Britain made overlapping wartime commitments: the Hussein–McMahon correspondence, which Arab leaders read as a promise of independence, the secret Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916 with France, and the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, which supported "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. British forces under General Allenby captured Jerusalem in December 1917. In 1922 the League of Nations confirmed Britain's mandate over Palestine, incorporating the Balfour commitment.

The 1922 census counted about 763,000 people, roughly 89 per cent of them Arab and 11 per cent Jewish. Jewish immigration rose sharply after Hitler came to power and during the persecution that led to the Holocaust, and Arab fears of losing the country fuelled violence in 1920, 1921 and 1929. The Arab revolt of 1936 to 1939 began as a general strike and became an armed rebellion against British rule and Zionist settlement. Britain suppressed it harshly, leaving the Palestinian leadership in exile or prison, and the Peel Commission of 1937 proposed partition for the first time. A 1939 White Paper limited Jewish immigration, and after World War II Jewish armed groups attacked British forces while survivors of the Holocaust sought entry. In 1947 the exhausted British Empire handed the question to the United Nations.

On 29 November 1947 the UN General Assembly recommended partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem under international rule. Zionist leaders accepted the plan; Palestinian Arab leaders and the Arab states rejected it, arguing that the Arab majority should decide the future of the whole country. Civil war followed. Israel declared independence on 14 May 1948, and armies from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria and Iraq entered the country the next day.

By the 1949 armistices, Israel held about 78 per cent of the former mandate. Some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs, more than half the Arab population, had fled or been expelled, and hundreds of villages were depopulated and later destroyed. Palestinians call this the Nakba, the catastrophe, and regard their refugees' right of return as central to any settlement. Israeli accounts have traditionally stressed that the war was started by Arab rejection of partition and that many left on their own or at the urging of Arab leaders, while historians, including Israeli "new historians" working from archives, have documented expulsions and massacres such as that at Deir Yassin. The UN set up UNRWA to support the refugees, whose descendants now number millions.

What remained of Arab Palestine was divided. Jordan annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1950 and gave its residents Jordanian citizenship, a move few states recognised. Egypt administered the Gaza Strip, crowded with refugees, as a separate territory, initially through the short-lived All-Palestine Government, which it dissolved in 1959. Palestinians also lived as refugees in Lebanon and Syria, and many worked in the Gulf. A new generation founded the Fatah movement in the late 1950s, and in 1964 the Arab League, encouraged by Gamal Abdel Nasser, created the Palestine Liberation Organization.

In the Six-Day War of June 1967, Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan and Gaza from Egypt, along with Sinai and the Golan Heights. Israel extended its law to an enlarged East Jerusalem, which no other state recognises as annexation, and began building settlements in the occupied territories. Most of the international community and the UN consider the settlements illegal under international law, which Israel disputes. UN Security Council Resolution 242 called for withdrawal from occupied territories in return for peace.

After 1967 armed groups under Yasser Arafat took over the PLO and carried out guerrilla raids and attacks on Israeli targets, including civilians, which Israel and its allies regarded as terrorism. The PLO was expelled from Jordan after fighting in 1970 and 1971, moved to Lebanon, and was driven to Tunis by Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, during which Lebanese Christian militiamen massacred Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila camps. In 1974 the Arab League recognised the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and the UN granted it observer status. These struggles unfolded within the wider Cold War, with the United States backing Israel and the Soviet bloc supporting the PLO.

In December 1987 a mass uprising, the First Intifada, broke out in Gaza and spread to the West Bank, with strikes, boycotts, stone-throwing and Israeli military repression. The Islamist movement Hamas was founded the same year. In 1988 Jordan gave up its claim to the West Bank, and on 15 November the PLO's parliament in exile declared the State of Palestine and implicitly accepted a two-state solution. By the end of the year 78 countries had recognised it.

Secret talks led to the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995, in which the PLO recognised Israel's right to exist and Israel recognised the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians. A Palestinian Authority took over limited self-government in parts of Gaza and the West Bank, which was divided into Areas A, B and C, with Israel keeping full control of Area C, about 60 per cent of it. Arafat returned in 1994 and was elected president in 1996. The final issues of borders, Jerusalem, refugees and settlements were left for later talks, but the process faltered amid Hamas suicide bombings, the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 and continued settlement growth. Talks at Camp David in 2000 failed, and each side blamed the other.

The Second Intifada, which began in September 2000, was far deadlier, with suicide bombings in Israeli cities and large Israeli military operations in Palestinian towns. Israel began building a separation barrier in the West Bank in 2002, which it described as a security measure and Palestinians as a land grab. Arafat died in 2004 and Mahmoud Abbas was elected president in 2005. The same year Israel withdrew its settlers and troops from Gaza while keeping control of its borders, airspace and coast.

Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections of January 2006, taking 74 of 132 seats. Israel, the United States and the European Union, which list Hamas as a terrorist organisation, imposed sanctions, and tension with Abbas's Fatah turned into open fighting. In June 2007 Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip, while the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority remained in charge of the Palestinian-administered parts of the West Bank. Israel and Egypt then imposed a blockade on Gaza, which Israel justified on security grounds and human rights groups described as collective punishment. Wars between Israel and Gaza's armed groups followed in 2008 and 2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021, and repeated reconciliation agreements between Hamas and Fatah were never fully carried out. No national elections were held after 2006.

On the diplomatic front, Palestine was admitted to UNESCO in 2011 and in November 2012 the UN General Assembly voted 138 to 9 to make it a non-member observer state. It joined the International Criminal Court in 2015.

On 7 October 2023 Hamas led an attack on southern Israel that killed about 1,195 people, most of them civilians, and took 251 hostages, the deadliest day in Israel's history. Israel responded with an air campaign and a ground invasion of Gaza aimed at destroying Hamas. The war became the deadliest in the history of the conflict for Palestinians: by October 2026 more than 74,000 Palestinians in Gaza had been reported killed, nearly all of the Strip's 2.3 million people had been displaced, most buildings and infrastructure were destroyed, and the tightened blockade produced famine conditions. A UN commission of inquiry concluded in September 2025 that Israel had committed genocide, and a genocide case against Israel is before the International Court of Justice; Israel and the United States reject the charge, and Israel says it is fighting Hamas, which it accuses of embedding itself among civilians. Violence also rose sharply in the West Bank, with Israeli raids, settler attacks and record land seizures.

Short ceasefires in November 2023 and January 2025 broke down. A US-led plan announced in September 2025 brought a ceasefire on 10 October 2025, the release of the living hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, and a UN Security Council endorsement in November 2025 of a transitional administration of Palestinian technocrats overseen by an international Board of Peace. Disputes over Hamas's disarmament and Israel's withdrawal stalled the plan. In July 2026 Hamas announced that its civil administration in Gaza had resigned, and an agreement followed for Gaza's armed groups to disarm, conditional on reconstruction and Israeli withdrawal, yet Israeli strikes continued and Israeli forces controlled around two-thirds of the Strip by October 2026.

The war also shifted diplomacy. In September 2025 the United Kingdom, France, Canada and Australia were among the states that recognised Palestine, bringing the total to 157 of the 193 UN member states. The United States, which has vetoed full UN membership, and several other Western governments still do not recognise it. In 2026 the borders of a Palestinian state, the status of Jerusalem, the future of the settlements and the fate of the refugees all remained unresolved.