Two pieces of land
The Palestinian territories are two separate pieces of land, with Israel between them. The West Bank, west of the Jordan River, is a ridge of rocky hills around Nablus, Ramallah, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Hebron. To the east the land falls steeply to the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea, the lowest point on land. The Gaza Strip is a small, crowded stretch of flat coast on the Mediterranean, between Israel and Egypt. Summers are hot and dry, winters cool and wet, and water is scarce, with most of it controlled by Israel.
A disputed land
For four centuries the land was Ottoman, then British. In the war of 1948 the State of Israel was founded, and about 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes, an event Palestinians call the Nakba, "the catastrophe". Many ended up in Gaza, then ruled by Egypt, and the West Bank, then ruled by Jordan. In 1967 Israel took both, annexed East Jerusalem and began building Jewish settlements.
The peace agreements of the 1990s created the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank's cities, while Israel keeps full control of about 60% of the land, including the settlements and most of the countryside. Palestinians want an independent state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, and most countries in the world now recognise a State of Palestine. Many in Israel want to keep the West Bank: in October 2025 Israel's parliament gave a first vote to a bill to annex it, and a settlement project near Jerusalem, approved in August 2025, would cut it in two. Hamas, which won Palestinian elections in 2006, took over Gaza in 2007 and has ruled it since.
The people
About 5.6 million Palestinians live in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, out of some 15 million worldwide. It is a young population: more than a third are children under 15. Many are descendants of the 1948 refugees, and some still live in refugee camps. Almost all are Arabic-speaking Palestinians, but small communities have their own stories: Bedouin herders in the West Bank hills, the Dom, a small minority who often face prejudice, Black Palestinians in Jericho and Gaza, a few hundred Samaritans who keep an ancient faith on Mount Gerizim, and Armenian and Syriac Christian families in Bethlehem. More than half a million Israeli settlers also live in the West Bank, outside East Jerusalem.
War and life today
On 7 October 2023 Hamas attacked Israel and took hostages, and Israel answered with a war on Gaza. By the end of 2025 about 71,000 Gazans had been killed, by Palestinian count, almost everyone had been forced from their home, and in 2025 famine struck part of the Strip. A ceasefire began in October 2025 and the last living hostages were freed, but Israeli forces still hold more than half of Gaza. About 1.7 million people live in tents and makeshift camps, hospitals only partly work, and children returned to classrooms in September 2026 for the first time in three years.
West Bank life is shaped by checkpoints, permits and the Israeli army. Settler attacks on Palestinian villages and Bedouin camps have reached record levels, Israeli military operations have emptied refugee camps in the north, and about 80,000 Palestinians who worked in Israel lost their jobs after October 2023. The Palestinian Authority cannot pay full salaries because Israel withholds the taxes it collects on its behalf. Jobs are scarce, though almost everyone can read.
Faith
Almost all Palestinians are Sunni Muslims. Islam is the official religion of the Palestinian Authority and Islamic law a main source of its laws, while its Basic Law calls for respect for other faiths. Israeli permits limit West Bank Muslims' and Christians' access to the holy places of Jerusalem.
The church and freedom of belief
Most Palestinian Christians are Greek Orthodox, along with Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans and small evangelical churches. About 40,000 to 50,000 live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, half of them around Bethlehem, and their church schools also teach many Muslim children. Their numbers keep falling as families emigrate, driven out by economic hardship, settler violence and limits on movement. In Gaza, about 1,000 Christians lived before the war; a few hundred remain, and two churches and a church hospital were struck during the fighting. In the West Bank, settlers burned a church at Taybeh in 2025.
Thirteen churches are officially recognised; others, including some evangelical churches, work under unwritten understandings and may not seek converts. Leaving Islam is not a crime under Palestinian law, but a Muslim who becomes a Christian can face violence from family, loss of inheritance and marriage rights, and pressure from security services, and in Gaza Hamas enforces its own reading of Islamic law.
