The West Bank and Gaza

Old names, many rulers

Gaza has been lived in for more than three thousand years; the earliest record of it is from the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III in the 15th century BCE. The Philistines settled it after three centuries of Egyptian rule, and it fell in turn to the Israelite king David, the Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians and Persians, and then to Alexander the Great. Arabs took it in 635 CE and it became a Muslim city.^[8]

The hills of the West Bank are Samaria, the region of the ancient kingdom of Israel, north of Jerusalem, and the Judaean hills to the south.^[9][1] Israelis know the area by those biblical names, Judaea and Samaria.^[10] The name Palestine reached English from Greek through Latin; the Hebrew Bible used a similar word, Peleshet, for the Philistines, and the Romans first used the name for a province, Syria Palaestina, in the 2nd century CE.^[9]

From 1516, when the Ottoman sultan Selim I defeated the Mamluks, Palestine had four centuries of Ottoman rule. By the late 19th century it was split between the districts of Nablus and Acre, linked to the province of Beirut, and an autonomous district of Jerusalem that answered directly to Istanbul.^[3] Its Arab population, Muslim and Christian, descends in most cases from people who had lived there for centuries.^[9]

The first Jewish agricultural settlement was founded by Russian Jews in 1882, and in 1896 Theodor Herzl called for a Jewish state, preferably in Palestine. By 1914 Palestine had about 690,000 people: 535,000 Muslims, 70,000 Christians and 85,000 Jews. Arab newspapers of the time show that opposition to Zionism, the movement for a Jewish homeland, was already strong among some educated Arabs before World War I.^[3]

Promises and a mandate

During World War I Britain made promises that pulled in different directions. Palestinian Arabs believed it had promised them independence in letters of 1915–16 to Hussein ibn Ali, the emir of Mecca; in the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 Britain, France and Russia planned to internationalise most of Palestine; and in November 1917 the Balfour Declaration backed a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people. British forces took Gaza and Jerusalem in late 1917.^[4][8]

In 1920 the Allies gave Britain a mandate, a League of Nations commission to govern the territory, and the mandate came into force in 1923. It committed Britain to establishing the Jewish national home and to developing self-governing institutions. Transjordan, the three-quarters of the mandate east of the Jordan River, was excluded from the national-home clauses.^[4] Palestinian Arabs called 1920, when hopes of independence within a united Syria collapsed, the “year of the catastrophe”.^[4]

Under the mandate the central issues were Jewish immigration and land purchases, which Jews sought to increase and Arabs to slow or stop. Violence broke out repeatedly: riots in Jerusalem in 1920 and Jaffa in 1921, and in 1929 clashes in Jerusalem, Safed and Hebron in which some 250 people were killed. With Nazi persecution in Europe, Jewish immigration rose from 30,000 in 1933 to 61,000 in 1935, and by 1936 Jews were about a third of the population.^[4]

An Arab revolt against British rule and Jewish immigration lasted from 1936 to 1939; by some estimates more than 5,000 Arabs were killed. In 1937 the Peel Commission called the mandate unworkable and proposed partition. The Zionists cautiously accepted it; the Arabs were horrified, above all by its proposal to transfer Arabs out of the Jewish state. In 1939 Britain limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 over five years, which the Zionists saw as a death blow as Jews tried to flee Europe.^[5]

After World War II and the Holocaust, Jewish underground groups attacked the British; in 1946 the Irgun bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91. In February 1947 Britain handed the question of Palestine to the United Nations.^[5]

“nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”^[4]

Partition and the war of 1948

On 29 November 1947 the UN General Assembly voted by a two-thirds majority, in Resolution 181, to divide Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem international. At the time about 1,269,000 Arabs and 678,000 Jews lived in Palestine. The Zionists welcomed the plan, which gave the Jewish state slightly more than half the land west of the Jordan; the Arabs rejected it, both in principle and because nearly half the Jewish state’s population would be Arab.^[5] The areas that became the West Bank and Gaza were allotted largely to the Arab state.^[1][2]

Fighting began at once. Arab fighters ambushed a bus of Jewish passengers on 30 November; in April 1948 Irgun and Stern Gang fighters massacred villagers at Deir Yassin, and days later Arab forces killed 78 people in a convoy to Hadassah Hospital.^[11] Israel was proclaimed on 14 May 1948, on the eve of the mandate’s end, and the next day the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon entered Palestine. They took East Jerusalem, including the small Jewish quarter of the Old City, but Israel won the war.^[11][5]

Israel calls it the War of Independence; Palestinians call it the Nakba, “the catastrophe”. Estimates of the Arabs displaced range from about 520,000 to 1,000,000, and there is general agreement that the number was more than 600,000 and probably above 700,000; they were driven out by Zionist and then Israeli forces or fled for fear of them. More than 400 Arab villages disappeared. About 276,000 moved to the West Bank and 160,000–190,000 to Gaza.^[12][11]

The armistices of 1949 left Israel with about four-fifths of the mandate west of the Jordan; the rest was held by Transjordan and Egypt.^[5] The Arab state of the partition plan never came into being.^[1]

Jordan’s West Bank, 1948–67

Transjordan held the hills west of the Jordan River, including East Jerusalem, renamed itself the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1949, and formally annexed the West Bank on 24 April 1950. Only Britain and Pakistan recognised the annexation.^[5][1] Unlike Egypt in Gaza, Jordan gave Palestinians citizenship, from 1949, and a majority of all Palestinians became Jordanian citizens. Half the seats in Jordan’s Chamber of Deputies were reserved for the West Bank.^[12]

By 1967 the West Bank held about 47% of Jordan’s people and produced about 30% of its GDP. The relationship between the two banks was uneasy: many Palestinians distrusted the Hashemite dynasty and hoped for a state of their own, and many backed Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser rather than Jordan’s more cautious King Hussein.^[1][12] In 1957, after an attempted coup by National Guard members drawn mainly from the West Bank, the king banned political parties and set up a royal dictatorship.^[13]

Jordan developed little industry there; by the mid-1960s the West Bank had fewer than a dozen businesses with more than 30 workers.^[1] About 300,000 Palestinians, most of them refugees from 1948, moved from the West Bank to the East Bank in the year after the war.^[1] In the 1950s Jordan’s relations with Israel were uneasy but tolerable, with bloody raids by both sides. From 1965 Fatah, a Palestinian guerrilla group, raided Israel from Jordan, and Israel retaliated in the West Bank; in November 1966 an Israeli strike on the village of Al-Samu killed 18.^[13][14]

Egypt’s Gaza Strip, 1948–67

Egyptian forces entered the town of Gaza soon after the war began in May 1948, and fighting that autumn shrank the area they held to a strip 40 km long and 6–8 km wide. Its lines were set by the Egyptian-Israeli armistice of 24 February 1949.^[2] Egypt did not annex it; a military governor ran it, from 1949 to 1956 and again from 1957 to 1967.^[8][2]

The strip’s central problem was the refugees, crowded into camps and living in extreme poverty. Egypt did not treat the area as part of Egypt and did not let the refugees become Egyptian citizens or move to Egypt or other Arab countries, which left them stateless; Israel did not let them return to their homes or compensate them.^[2][12] Britannica calls Egyptian rule “generally repressive”, with little Palestinian control of local government, though Gazans could attend Egyptian universities and at times elect local officials.^[12]

In 1948 Amin al-Husseini, the leading Palestinian politician of the mandate years, declared a Government of All Palestine in Gaza, but it depended entirely on Egypt and did not last.^[4][12] The UN set up UNRWA, its relief agency for Palestinian refugees, in December 1949; it ran camps in Gaza, both banks of the Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.^[12]

Many young refugees became fedayeen, guerrillas who attacked Israel. Those raids, with Egypt’s blockade of the Straits of Tiran, were among the reasons Israel joined Britain and France against Egypt in the Suez Crisis of 1956. Israel invaded on 29 October and took the strip, then withdrew in March 1957 under strong international pressure.^[2][15]

The Six-Day War

In 1964 an Arab summit in Cairo created the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO); its 1968 charter called for the total liberation of Palestine and the destruction of Israel.^[10] Guerrilla attacks on Israel from Syria, Lebanon and Jordan increased, as did Israeli reprisals. In May 1967 Nasser moved troops into Sinai, asked the UN force on the border to leave and closed the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping; King Hussein signed a defence pact with Egypt on 30 May.^[14]

On 5 June 1967 Israel launched a surprise air attack that destroyed most of Egypt’s air force, and within three days it had taken Gaza and Sinai. Jordan shelled West Jerusalem the same day, despite Israel’s warning, and by 7 June Israel had driven Jordan out of East Jerusalem and most of the West Bank.^[14] Hussein had judged that losing the West Bank was better than losing his kingdom, which he believed Egypt and Syria would help the Palestinians overthrow if he stayed out.^[13]

More than 250,000 Palestinians fled east across the Jordan (Britannica’s West Bank article puts those who left the West Bank at about 380,000), and about 600,000 stayed in the West Bank and 300,000 in Gaza.^[10][1] In November the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242, calling for Israel to withdraw from territories captured in the war in exchange for lasting peace; it became the basis of later peace efforts.^[14]

Occupation and the first intifada

Israel put the West Bank under military administration, incorporated East Jerusalem and banned political symbols and publications in the rest.^[1] A movement grew among Israelis to settle the territories, particularly the West Bank, as part of the Jewish patrimony in the Holy Land; several thousand settled there in the first decade.^[10] From the late 1970s settlement accelerated: under Menachem Begin (1977–83) the number of settlements more than tripled and the number of settlers rose more than fivefold. Israel regarded the West Bank as vital to its security. The PLO refused to negotiate with Israel and, until 1988, to recognise its right to exist; Israel refused to negotiate with or recognise the PLO until years after that.^[1]

In December 1987 riots in Gaza began the first intifada, an Arabic word meaning “shaking off”. Young Palestinians threw stones at Israeli troops, who shot and arrested them; Israel closed schools, demolished houses and imposed curfews. By mid-1990 the Red Cross estimated that more than 800 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces and fewer than 50 Israelis had died; hundreds more Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel were killed by other Palestinians.^[16][2]

Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, was founded that December by members of the Muslim Brotherhood and religious factions of the PLO. Its 1988 charter called waging holy war to take Palestine from Israel a religious duty.^[17] In 1988 King Hussein gave up Jordan’s claim to the West Bank.^[1] On 15 November 1988 Yasser Arafat, the PLO’s chairman, proclaimed a State of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza, and in December he recognised Israel, accepted Resolution 242 and rejected terrorism.^[16]

Oslo and its collapse

After a peace conference in Madrid in 1991 and secret talks in Norway, Israel and the PLO signed the Oslo Accords’ Declaration of Principles on 13 September 1993. They recognised each other and agreed that Palestinians would govern themselves in the West Bank and Gaza for five years while a permanent settlement was negotiated.^[16] Israel withdrew from Jericho and parts of Gaza in May 1994, and Arafat entered Gaza on 1 July.^[16]

An agreement of 28 September 1995 divided the West Bank into Area A under Palestinian control, Area B under Palestinian civil and joint security control, and Area C under full Israeli control.^[1][16] On 4 November 1995 Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist. Arafat won the Palestinian presidency in January 1996; Hamas boycotted the vote and kept up its violent opposition to the peace process.^[16]

The 1999 deadline for a final settlement passed. By 2000 less than a fifth of the West Bank and about two-thirds of Gaza were under full Palestinian control, the number of settlers had grown by some 80,000 since the peace process began, and the Palestinian Authority faced accusations of corruption.^[16] A US-hosted summit at Camp David in July 2000 failed, and after the Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount in September the second intifada began. Palestinian suicide bombings killed many Israelis, most of them civilians; more than 1,000 people died in its first 18 months, most of them Palestinian civilians. In 2002 Israeli troops reoccupied the West Bank’s towns.^[16]

Two territories, two governments

Israel withdrew its soldiers and settlers from Gaza in September 2005 but kept control of its borders and airspace, while Egypt patrolled the strip’s border with Egypt.^[2] Hamas, which Israel, the US and the EU list as a terrorist group, won Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006, and in June 2007 it took control of Gaza after fighting with Fatah, while a Fatah-led cabinet took over in the West Bank. Israel declared Gaza a hostile entity and blockaded it; Egypt kept its own crossing closed for years.^[2][18]

Rocket fire from Gaza and Israeli strikes became routine, with larger wars in 2008–09, when 13 Israelis and more than 1,000 Gazans were killed, and in 2014, when some 2,100 Palestinians and more than 70 Israelis died.^[19][18] In 2017 Hamas acknowledged a Palestinian state on the lines of 1967 as a “formula of national consensus” but still rejected Israel’s legitimacy.^[17]

In the West Bank, settlement kept growing; the settler population outside East Jerusalem more than doubled between 2005 and 2020.^[9] A government that took office in Israel in December 2022 created a Settlements Administration, and in 2025 its cabinet approved 54 new settlements, increasing the number approved by nearly half. Settler attacks on Palestinians rose sharply from late 2023.^[1]

War since 2023

On 7 October 2023 Hamas attacked Israel from Gaza, killing at least 1,200 people and taking about 240 hostages, the deadliest day in Israel since its independence; Israel declared war the next day.^[18] By December 2025, according to UN figures citing local health authorities, more than 70,000 Palestinians had been killed since 7 October 2023.^[7] In the West Bank, Israel raided refugee camps in the north almost daily and in August 2024 launched a large offensive around Jenin and Tulkarm.^[1]

In July 2024 the International Court of Justice, asked by the UN General Assembly, gave an advisory opinion that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful and should end “as rapidly as possible”, and that it must stop all new settlement activity and evacuate all settlers.^[6] Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the opinion “absurd” and said Jews were not “occupiers in their own land”.^[20]

“under an obligation to cease immediately all new settlement activities and to evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory”^[6]

A ceasefire and a Board of Peace

On 8 October 2025 Israel and Hamas agreed a ceasefire as the first stage of a US plan: hostages were exchanged for Palestinian detainees, aid increased, and Israeli forces pulled back to a line that still left them controlling an estimated 53–58% of Gaza. In November the UN Security Council, in resolution 2803, welcomed a Board of Peace chaired by Donald Trump and authorised an International Stabilization Force. The next stage calls for Hamas to disarm, Israeli forces to withdraw further and a technocratic Palestinian administration to take over.^[7]

The ceasefire has been repeatedly broken, with each side accusing the other.^[7] In September 2026 the Board of Peace published a six-month, $2.4 billion reconstruction plan, and its High Representative, Nickolay Mladenov, said it depended on Hamas disarming.^[21]