What exactly the definition of Palestine or Palestinian Territories includes will be clear only if and when the political and diplomatic process that began in 1991 with the Madrid Conference and continued with the 1993 Washington Declaration of Principles ends.

According to Localcollegeexplorer, the territories corresponding to the state of Israel and the Palestinian Territories were part of several administrative units of the Ottoman Empire: the independent Jerusalem sangjak and the Nablus and Akka sangjacats, which also included part of present-day southern Lebanon, both administrative divisions of the vilâyet of Beirut. The present extreme south of Israel was part of the Maan Sanjak, part of the Damascus vilâyet. The leadership Palestinian and all Arab countries rejected United Nations Resolution 181 of 1947 which provided for the establishment of a Jewish state, an Arab state and an internationalized territory over Mandatory Palestine. The situation that emerged from the First Arab-Israeli War (1948-49, nicknamed Naqba, ‘catastrophe’, by the Arabs) sanctioned the failure of the creation of a Palestinian state and established control of the residual Palestinian territories by Egypt (Gaza Strip) and Transjordan (West Bank or West Bank, West Bank in English, al- Diffa al-Gharbiyya in Arabic). The West Bank was later annexed to Transjordan in 1951 by King Abdullah I, who thus created the kingdom of Jordan. This situation – with the interlude of the Second Arab-Israeli War of 1956 regarding the Gaza Strip – characterized a period of about twenty years, up to the so-called Six Day War (1967). Since 1967, Israel has controlled all Arab-Palestinian territories for a long time.

With the agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (O lp) – from the 1993 Declaration of Principles to the 1997 Hebron Accords – the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were divided into three zones: zone A under total control of the Palestinian National Authority (A np), who is responsible for both safety and administration; Zone B is under Palestinian administration and Israeli security control; finally, zone C placed under total Israeli control. This situation changed with the almost complete reoccupation of the West Bank by the Israeli military in 2003, an action that the Israeli government justified by appealing to the ‘need’ to curb a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings. The situation was further complicated by the unilateral Israeli abandonment of Gaza and the construction of the wall, a multi-layered surveillance and barrage system that often goes beyond the so-called ‘Green Line’, i.e. the cease-line line. fire, established in 1949.

The ‘state in formation’ constituted by the Palestinian National Authority (A np, in Arabic al-Sulta al-Wataniyya al-Filastiniyya) has a semi-presidential structure: the president is elected directly by the people, while the legislative power is exercised by the Legislative Council which also gives confidence to the prime minister appointed by the president. The electoral system for the Legislative Council has changed over time: totally majority-based in a single round (one seat per college) in the first elections, in 2006 it was modified in a mixed sense – one half of the seats with the majority, the other with the proportional (only national list).

The two main Palestinian political forces are Fatah, the party of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, which controls the West Bank, and Hamas, the Islamic group that won the 2006 parliamentary elections and therefore has exercised control over the Gaza Strip since June 2007, after the so-called ‘battle of Gaza’ against Fatah. The leaders of the two formations signed a reconciliation agreement in May 2011 and 2012 – which later failed – which included the creation of an interim government of national unity, responsible for the upcoming elections of the legislative assembly of the NP, and the discussion on the representation of Hamas in the Palestinian National Council. However, there are still several obstacles to complete Fatah-Hamas reconciliation. In April 2013, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who has always been strongly opposed by Hamas but respected internationally, resigned, apparently for tax reasons, and was replaced by Rami Hamdallah. The reset in relations experienced a new important moment in April 2014 when, after weeks of intense secret talks in Gaza, Hamas and Fatah reached an agreement to establish a government of national unity., then officially took office on 2 June. An agreement that risked being wrecked immediately following the last war in the Gaza Strip between Israel and Hamas in July-August 2014, which resulted in over 2,200 deaths on both sides (around 70 Israelis killed) and 100,000 displaced interiors in the small spit of land nestled between Egypt and Israel. However, the experiment went into crisis about a year later, when in June 2015 Prime Minister Hamdallah resigned under pressure from Abu Mazen. Fatah’s partisan decision to end support for the national unity government was motivated primarily by the impossibility of making the executive operational within the Gaza Strip. Continued disagreements over the inclusion of Hamas government employees in Gaza within the Palestinian Authority, over funds for the reconstruction of the Strip and, finally, parallel talks between Hamas and Israel for a ceasefire led to the unilateral decision. of Fatah to withdraw support for the national unity government. Internal disagreements have led to the continuous postponement of the elections which, to 2016, have not yet been held. Meanwhile, the West Bank and Jerusalem have seen a dramatic increase in tension due to unilateral restrictions applied by the Israeli authorities for access to the Temple Mount following an agreement between Israel and Jordan (officially the guardian of the city’s Muslim holy places) which excluded Palestinian representatives, who accused Israel of wanting to exclude Arabs from the holy places of Jerusalem. Since September 2015, tensions have escalated into a new wave of violence, with the participation of many young Palestinians armed with knives in attacks on Israeli civilians, in what has been called the ‘Knife Intifada’. At the end of October, the violence subsided also thanks to the lack of support from the main Palestinian political organizations to one escalation that could have led to a true Third Intifada. On 29 November 2012, Palestine has been recognized by the General Assembly of the United Nations as’ non-member state observer ‘of a very important symbolic step towards recognition of the existence of a Palestinian state within the solution’ two peoples, two states’, promoted by the United Nations since 1948.