فلسطين
A timeline, from the first walled towns to the present day. The page darkens as the history does.
I
c. 3000 BCE
Jericho has been lived in for around ten thousand years, which makes it one of the oldest towns on earth. Through the Bronze Age the land between the sea and the river was Canaan: walled city-states such as Megiddo, Hazor, Gezer and Jerusalem, trading olive oil, wine and grain with Egypt and Mesopotamia. The olive terraces were already being built.
c. 1150 BCE
Sea peoples the Egyptians called the Peleset settled the southern coast and built five cities: Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron and Gath. From their Philistia the Greeks made Palaistinē; Herodotus was using the word in the fifth century BCE for the whole coast and its hinterland. The name has been on the map for two and a half thousand years.
135
After crushing the Bar Kokhba revolt, the emperor Hadrian folded Judaea into a province he named Syria Palaestina and rebuilt Jerusalem as a Roman colony, Aelia Capitolina, from which Jews were barred. The Roman name passed to the Byzantines, and from them into Arabic as Filastin.
II
326
Under Constantine's mother Helena, Jerusalem's churches rose over the sites of the Passion, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was dedicated in 335. For three centuries Palestine was a Christian land of monasteries, mosaic floors and pilgrim roads, its people speaking Aramaic and Greek.
638
The caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab accepted the city's surrender from its patriarch, Sophronius, and by tradition guaranteed the safety of its Christians and their churches. In 691 the Umayyads completed the Dome of the Rock. Over the following centuries Arabic became the language of the land and Islam the faith of most of its people, alongside Christian and Jewish communities that never left.
1099
On 15 July 1099 the armies of the First Crusade took Jerusalem and killed most of its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. For most of a century a Latin kingdom ruled from the city. In 1187, after the battle of Hattin, Saladin took Jerusalem back and let its people ransom themselves rather than repeat the slaughter.
1291
Sultans ruling from Cairo drove the last Crusaders from Acre in 1291 and spent the next two centuries endowing Jerusalem with madrasas, hospices and fountains. Much of the stone fabric of the Old City that visitors walk through today is Mamluk.
III
1516
Selim I defeated the Mamluks at Marj Dabiq and Palestine passed to the Ottoman Empire, where it stayed for four hundred years. His son Suleiman rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem between 1537 and 1541. They are the walls that stand today.
1834
When Muhammad Ali of Egypt, then ruling the province, imposed conscription and new taxes, the villagers of the Nablus, Hebron and Jerusalem hills rose together. The revolt was put down harshly. Historians often point to it as an early moment when the people of Palestine acted as one.
1882
Late Ottoman Palestine held roughly half a million people, overwhelmingly Arab, Muslim and Christian, with small Jewish communities in the holy cities. From 1882 Zionist settlers began arriving from Europe and buying land, often from absentee landlords, so that the tenant farmers who had worked it were turned off. Jaffa's oranges were shipped to Liverpool.
IV
1917
On 2 November 1917 the British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, wrote that his government viewed "with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people", provided nothing prejudiced the civil and religious rights of the "existing non-Jewish communities". Those communities were about nine in ten of the population. Five weeks later British troops entered Jerusalem.
1922
The League of Nations confirmed Britain's Mandate over Palestine and wrote the Balfour promise into its terms. Palestinians petitioned, struck and formed congresses; their demand for a representative government was refused. As persecution in Europe grew in the 1930s, Jewish immigration rose sharply, and with it the fear of dispossession.
1936
A six-month general strike became a three-year armed uprising against British rule and Zionist immigration. Britain answered with collective punishment, house demolitions and mass detention. Around five thousand Palestinians were killed, their leaders were exiled or imprisoned, and Palestinian society went into 1948 already broken.
1947
On 29 November the UN General Assembly voted for Resolution 181, dividing Palestine into a Jewish state on about 56 per cent of the land and an Arab state on about 43, with Jerusalem under international rule. Jews were then a third of the population and owned around seven per cent of the land. Arab leaders rejected the plan. Fighting began within days.
V
1948
Between late 1947 and 1949, more than 700,000 Palestinians, over half of the Arab population, fled or were driven from their homes. More than 400 villages were emptied and most were later demolished. Massacres such as Deir Yassin, on 9 April, spread the flight. Israel declared its independence on 14 May. Palestinians call it al-Nakba, the catastrophe. Families took their house keys with them, expecting to be back within weeks.
1949
The armistice lines left Israel with 78 per cent of Mandate Palestine; Jordan held the West Bank and Egypt administered Gaza. Israel barred the refugees from returning. In December the UN created UNRWA to feed and school them, and Resolution 194 affirmed their right to return home or be compensated. Tents became breeze-block. Today UNRWA registers around 5.9 million Palestine refugees.
1964
The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in Jerusalem. After 1967 it passed to the guerrilla movements led by Yasser Arafat, and in 1974 the Arab League and the UN recognised it as the representative of the Palestinian people. For the first time since 1948 there was a Palestinian voice in the room.
1967
In six days in June, Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, Sinai and the Golan Heights. Around 300,000 Palestinians were displaced, many for the second time. Military occupation began, and with it settlement, which the UN Security Council and the International Court of Justice have found to be unlawful. It has now lasted longer than most Palestinians have been alive.
VI
1987
It began in Jabalia camp in December, after an Israeli truck killed four workers, and spread across Gaza and the West Bank: strikes, boycotts, tax refusal, stones against soldiers, neighbourhood committees. Over six years more than a thousand Palestinians were killed and tens of thousands detained. The uprising put Palestinian self-determination back on the world's agenda.
1993
Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn. The Palestinian Authority was created to run parts of the West Bank and Gaza, carved into Areas A, B and C, with the hard questions (borders, Jerusalem, refugees, settlements) deferred to talks that were meant to end in 1999. They never concluded. The settler population roughly doubled in the Oslo years.
2000
Sparked in September 2000 after Ariel Sharon's visit to the al-Aqsa compound, the second uprising was far bloodier than the first: around 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis were killed. In 2002 Israel began building a barrier through the West Bank. The International Court of Justice ruled in 2004 that where it runs inside occupied territory it is contrary to international law.
2007
Israel withdrew its settlers from Gaza in 2005. After Hamas won the 2006 elections and took control of the Strip in 2007, Israel and Egypt closed it to most people and goods. Two million people lived on 365 square kilometres; by 2012 the UN was warning the territory could be unliveable by 2020. Wars in 2008 to 2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021 killed more than four thousand Palestinians.
2012
On 29 November 2012, sixty-five years to the day after the partition vote, the UN General Assembly recognised Palestine as a non-member observer state, by 138 votes to 9. By late 2025 more than 150 of the UN's 193 members had recognised the State of Palestine, including the United Kingdom, France, Canada and Australia.
VII
2023
On 7 October 2023 Hamas-led fighters attacked southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages. Israel's war on Gaza that followed killed more than 60,000 Palestinians by mid-2025, a majority of them women and children, according to Gaza's Ministry of Health, and displaced almost the entire population. In August 2025 the UN-backed IPC confirmed famine in Gaza governorate. The International Court of Justice ordered provisional measures in a genocide case brought by South Africa; the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders; a UN Commission of Inquiry concluded in September 2025 that Israel had committed genocide, a finding Israel rejects.
2025
A ceasefire took effect on 10 October 2025 under a US-brokered plan, and on 13 October the last living hostages were freed in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. Most of Gaza's homes, hospitals and schools were destroyed or damaged, and the UN put the rubble at tens of millions of tonnes. Strikes and deaths continued at a lower level in the months that followed. Nothing about the peace was settled.
What has been recorded since 7 October 2023, as reported by Gaza's Ministry of Health and UN OCHA and compiled each day by Tech for Palestine. Figures as of 23 September 2026.
73,922
people killed in Gaza
20,179
of them children
12,500
of them women
174,995
injured
262
journalists killed
1,701
medical workers killed
1,123
killed in the West Bank, 240 of them children
1,083 daily reports from the Ministry of Health. Where a day's report is missing, the series is carried forward. Hover or touch the line for a date.
| Date | Killed, cumulative |
|---|---|
| 7 October 2023 (First day) | 232 |
| 1 January 2024 | 21,978 |
| 1 July 2024 | 37,900 |
| 1 January 2025 | 45,553 |
| 1 July 2025 | 56,647 |
| 10 October 2025 (Ceasefire) | 67,211 |
| 1 January 2026 | 71,271 |
| 1 July 2026 | 73,070 |
| 23 September 2026 (Latest report) | 73,922 |
Of the 72,835 people identified by name so far, 21,637 were under 18. The list runs to 7 May 2026 and lags the daily count. Hover or touch a bar for an age.
| Age | People |
|---|---|
| 0 to 4 | 5,293 |
| 5 to 9 | 5,485 |
| 10 to 14 | 6,235 |
| 15 to 17 | 4,624 |
| 18 to 29 | 19,360 |
| 30 to 44 | 18,831 |
| 45 to 59 | 7,833 |
| 60 to 74 | 4,039 |
| 75 to 100 and over | 1,135 |
72,835 marks, 200 to a row. The Ministry's own total is higher, at 73,922, and a study published in The Lancet in January 2025 estimated that even the Ministry's count of deaths from injuries up to June 2024 was about forty per cent short.
Each of them had a name. Read the names
صمود
Steadfastness. The key kept above the door. The olive tree that outlives whoever planted it, and whoever cut it down. Around fourteen million Palestinians are alive today, roughly half of them outside the land this page describes. The history is not over, and neither are they.