Israeli–Palestinian conflict

• 1. Introduction

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  The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a struggle over land and self-determination inside the former territory of Mandatory Palestine. Israel has held the West Bank and the Gaza Strip for so long that this is called the longest military occupation in modern history.

  The quarrel is not about one thing. Refugees, the status of Jerusalem, Israeli settlements, borders, security and water rights are all in dispute. So are the permit regime in the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian freedom of movement and the Palestinian right of return.

  Even the vocabulary is fought over. Historians, courts, governments and human rights groups often describe the same events in sharply different terms, and this documentary names who says what.

  Who made which promises, and to whom? Why did a United Nations plan lead to war instead of two states? Why did talks that looked close to success fall apart? And how did a dispute more than a century old reach the present day?

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• 2. Promises and Institutions

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  World War I began in 1914 with Great Britain and France arrayed against the Ottoman Empire. To win over Sharif Hussein bin Ali of Mecca and his Arab Sharifian Army, Britain made a pledge in the McMahon-Hussein correspondence. Hussein would control an independent state in the Arab areas of the Ottoman Empire. Palestine, however, was left out of that state in terms the record calls "ambiguously omitted." Britain supplied a large quantity of weapons to the Arab revolt of 1916-1918. With that help, it defeated Ottoman forces and took control of Palestine, Jordan and Syria.

  A secret deal from 1916 pointed the other way. The British and French governments had signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which unambiguously excluded Palestine from Arab control. It also ruled out any independent Arab state that included Palestine. The public promise came in 1917, when Britain issued the Balfour Declaration. It announced support for "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. Chaim Weizmann's efforts to build British backing for the Zionist movement had eventually produced it. In July 1920, French armed forces equipped with modern artillery crushed the short-lived Arab Kingdom of Syria. Its king was Emir Faisal, one of the leaders of the Arab revolt. Britain had tolerated his rule.

  Political Zionism arose in late 19th century Europe. It aimed to establish a Jewish state through colonization in Palestine. A significant wave of Jewish immigration arrived in that period, but Ottoman Palestine began to change dramatically only in the decade before 1914, when more ideologically Zionist immigrants came. Jewish land purchases and the eviction of tenant Arab peasants fed a growing Palestinian fear of dispossession. Armed confrontations in later years deepened it. Some Arabs voiced such fears as early as the 1880s. One Zionist writer reported that he had been accused of coming "to drive them out."

  The Jewish Agency for Palestine, set up in 1908 within the Zionist Organization, became the nearest thing to a government for the local Jewish community. After the British Mandate began, large-scale Jewish immigration arrived alongside a separate Jewish-controlled sector of the economy, supported by foreign capital. The British colonial government recognized Zionist organizations as legitimate, self-governing institutions, and together they formed the structure of a quasi state. Britain and the League of Nations gave the agency semi-official diplomatic status. The Mandate for Palestine recognized it "as a public body for the purpose of advising and cooperating with the Administration of Palestine." It was also entitled to diplomatic representation before the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission in Geneva, in London and elsewhere. After 1948 it was renamed the Jewish Agency for Israel.

  Historians Benny Morris and Rashid Khalidi agree that Palestine's Arab community did not have the same level of governance and recognition. They disagree about the reason. Khalidi, a Palestinian historian, argues that British colonial officials did not recognize the Arab majority, sometimes calling it the "non-Jewish communities," and dismissed the Palestine Arab Congress as unrepresentative. Morris, an Israeli historian, describes Palestine's Arabs of this period as a "vying coalition of clans" that created "political parties" for "form's sake."

  Large villages such as Lajjun and Hamama grew in size during the Mandate years. They reclaimed marginal lands and joined regional markets. Rural Palestine was expanding in people and in farming even as politics grew bitter.

  Herbert Samuel, the British High Commissioner, appointed Amin al-Husseini as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Husseini immediately named the Jewish national movement and Jewish immigration as enemies of his cause. He initiated large-scale riots against Jews in Jerusalem in 1920 and in Jaffa in 1921. One result was the creation of the Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary force. A further series of riots in 1929 killed 133 Jews and 116 Arabs, with heavy Jewish casualties in Hebron and Safed. Jews were evacuated from Hebron and Gaza afterward.

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• 3. Revolt and Transfer

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  Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, a militant from Syria who founded the Black Hand group, was killed by the British in late 1935. In the early 1930s the Arab national struggle in Palestine had drawn militants from across the Middle East, and his activity helped prepare the ground for what followed. In 1936, tensions erupted into an Arab general strike and a general boycott. The strike soon turned violent. The resulting 1936-1939 Arab revolt was peasant-led. It was a national struggle against British rule and against the rapid growth of Jewish settlement that British rule allowed, at a time of peak immigration from Europe. Rural fellahin faced land dispossession and abject poverty, which pushed many into flight to the cities and eroded traditional social bonds.

  The British armed forces put down the revolt with help from auxiliary units of the Palestine Police Force. These units were the Jewish Settlement Police, the Jewish Supernumerary Police and the Special Night Squads. Rashid Khalidi estimates that at least 10% of the adult male Palestinian population was killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled. Other estimates of deaths are lower. Official British figures and several Israeli historians attribute many of the Arab deaths to other causes. With much of its leadership expelled and its economy weakened, the Palestinian side struggled to confront the growing Zionist movement.

  The cost and risk of the revolt pushed Britain to change course and appoint the Peel Commission. The commission recommended a small Jewish country, and the two main Zionist leaders, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, accepted the idea. Their writings indicate that they expected a small state to expand later. The commission also proposed the transfer of the Arab Palestinian population, and the idea won the support of the Zionist leadership. Leaders advocated it to secure a Jewish demographic majority or as a response to violence. In 2004, the Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote that transfer was "inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism." By 2008 he clarified that it "had not been part of the original Zionist ideology" but was advocated from the mid-1930s in response to the violence of the revolt.

  The political scientist Norman Finkelstein notes that population transfer was seen as an acceptable answer to ethnic conflict until around World War II, and even for a time afterward. It was regarded as a drastic but "often necessary" step. Today it is often seen as a euphemism for ethnic cleansing.

  The White Paper of 1939 rejected a Jewish state and sought to limit Jewish immigration. It became the breaking point in relations between British authorities and the Zionist movement. The renewed violence of those years, which continued sporadically until World War II began, ended with around 5,000 casualties on the Arab side and 700 casualties combined on the British and Jewish sides.

  The outbreak of World War II calmed Mandatory Palestine. Palestinian Arabs shifted toward a more moderate stance under the leadership of the Nashashibi clan. A joint Jewish-Arab Palestine Regiment was set up under British command and fought German troops in North Africa. The exiled al-Husseini faction took the opposite course. It cooperated with Nazi Germany and helped build pro-Nazi propaganda machinery across the Arab world. After the defeat of Arab nationalists in Iraq, Husseini relocated to Nazi-occupied Europe, where he regularly demanded that the Italians and Germans bomb Tel Aviv. Meanwhile, 30,000 Palestinian Jews and 12,000 Palestinian Arabs enlisted in the British armed forces. A Jewish Brigade was created in 1944.

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• 4. Partition and War

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  The fate of Holocaust survivors from Europe set the Yishuv against the Mandate authorities as World War II ended. By 1944 Jewish groups were carrying out military-style operations against the British, aiming to persuade Britain to accept a Jewish state. This grew into the Jewish insurgency in Mandatory Palestine. The sustained paramilitary campaign, along with diplomatic damage and bad publicity worldwide from treating Jewish refugees as illegal immigrants, was a major factor in the British decision to leave. The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine was set up to decide what came next. It recommended partition and the end of the Mandate.

  On the 29th of November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 181(II). It recommended partitioning Palestine into an Arab state, a Jewish state and an international City of Jerusalem. Palestinian Arabs opposed the plan. The Yishuv accepted it but began to think about expanding Israel's borders beyond the allotment. One leader said that Jewish forces would capture more territory if a war were launched against them.

  The next day, violence swept Palestine and the 1947-1948 civil war began. For four months the Yishuv was mostly on the defensive, with occasional retaliation. The Arab League helped the Palestinian Arab cause by forming the volunteer Arab Liberation Army and by supporting the Palestinian Arab Holy War Army. That force was led by Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni and Hasan Salama. On the Jewish side, the underground militias Haganah, Irgun and Lehi did the fighting. They were strengthened by veterans of World War II and foreign volunteers. By spring 1948 the Arab forces were nearing collapse, while the Yishuv gained territory and a large refugee problem for Palestinian Arabs took shape.

  The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel came on the 14th of May 1948, when the British Mandate ended. The Arab League then intervened for the Palestinian Arabs, and the 1948 Arab-Israeli War began. The fighting caused around 15,000 casualties. It ended with cease-fire and armistice agreements in 1949. Israel held much of the former Mandate territory, Jordan occupied and later annexed the West Bank, and Egypt took over the Gaza Strip. The Arab League declared an All-Palestine Government in Gaza on the 22nd of September 1948. More than half of the Mandate's predominantly Palestinian Arab population fled or was expelled. About 750,000 Palestinian Arabs were driven out, an outcome that has been described as ethnic cleansing.

  In 1950, Israel passed the Law of Return. It allowed Jews and their spouses to become citizens with voting rights, even if they had never lived there before.

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• 5. From Suez to Beirut

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  Through the 1950s, Jordan and Egypt backed cross-border attacks by Palestinian Fedayeen militants, and Israel carried out reprisal operations in the host countries. The 1956 Suez Crisis brought a short Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and drove the All-Palestine Government into exile. It was restored when Israel withdrew. Egypt abandoned the government completely in 1959 and merged it into the United Arab Republic. Gaza then came under an Egyptian military administrator, which made it a de facto military occupation.

  Between 1948 and 1967, no independent Palestinian Arab state arose in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. Historians note that Palestinian political identity in the 1950s and early 1960s was often tied to Arab nationalism and Pan-Arabism, especially under Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. Several historians argue that the major Arab states focused on wider Arab goals, including opposition to Zionism, rather than on a distinct Palestinian state. In 1964, Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization was founded, won the support of most Arab League governments and received a seat in the league. Its original charter did not claim the West Bank or Gaza. Article 24 stated: "This Organization (PLO) does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip or in the Himmah Area."

  In the 1967 war, Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Egyptian Sinai, the Syrian Golan Heights and two islands in the Gulf of Aqaba. The PLO could not establish control on the ground and set up its headquarters in Jordan. From there it supported the Jordanian army in the War of Attrition. That base collapsed in the Jordanian-Palestinian civil war of 1970, and the PLO moved to South Lebanon. By the mid-1970s the international community had converged on a "land for peace" framework, with an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. The International Court of Justice and the United Nations endorsed it.

  On the 6th of October 1973, a coalition led mainly by Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel on Yom Kippur. The war ended in an Israeli victory, with tremendous casualties on both sides. The UN Security Council then passed Resolution 338, confirming the land-for-peace principle of Resolution 242 and starting the Middle East peace process. The Arab defeat shaped the PLO's willingness to seek a negotiated settlement. Many Israelis came to believe that the occupied area could not be held indefinitely by force. The Camp David Accords of 1978 aimed mainly at a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. They also proposed a "Self-Governing Authority" for the Arab population of the West Bank and Gaza, excluding Jerusalem, under Israeli control. The treaty was signed in 1979, and Israel left the Sinai Peninsula by 1982.

  In 1978, the Coastal Road massacre led to a full-scale Israeli invasion known as Operation Litani. It sought to push Palestinian militants out of Lebanon and enlarge the area held by Israel's Christian militia allies in the south. Much of the south ended up under an Israeli proxy that became the South Lebanon Army. Under United States pressure, Israeli forces eventually withdrew. In 1982 Israel returned, this time to dismantle the military and political power of the PLO in Lebanon and to help establish a friendly regime there. The PLO had observed the latest ceasefire and shown a preference for negotiation. Most Palestinian militants were defeated within weeks and Beirut was captured. Arafat decided to evacuate the PLO headquarters to Tunisia in June.

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• 6. Uprisings and Oslo

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  In 1987 a Palestinian uprising began, and historians do not agree on its causes beyond political frustration. Rashid Khalidi compares it to the revolt of 1936-1939. He sees a grassroots protest set off by a collision involving an Israeli army vehicle, and driven by suppression of the Palestinian national movement. He points to the many young people and the women who took leadership roles in normally male-dominated politics. The American political scientist Mary King sees a response to occupation, escalating attacks on Palestinians, settlement building and collective punishment. In her view the uprising consisted largely of nonviolent civil disobedience. Benny Morris points to the death of an Arab schoolgirl and the wounding of two others by stray bullets in the preceding weeks. He calls the uprising largely unarmed rather than nonviolent, noting the use of knives and improvised weapons and hundreds of casualties in the first month.

  By the early 1990s, the First Intifada had become the focus of international settlement efforts. The success of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty helped motivate them. The Oslo Accords of 1993 let the PLO relocate from Tunisia and take ground in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. They created the Palestinian National Authority. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad opposed the process and at once began a campaign of attacks on Israelis. After hundreds of casualties and a wave of anti-government propaganda, an Israeli far-right extremist assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin because he objected to the peace initiative. The newly elected Israeli government of 1996 then backed off from the process to some degree.

  In September 2000, after several years of unsuccessful negotiations, the conflict reignited as the Second Intifada. The violence grew into open conflict between the Palestinian National Security Forces and the Israel Defense Forces. It lasted until 2004 or 2005 and left thousands dead.

  In 2005, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered the removal of Israeli settlers and soldiers from Gaza. Israel and its Supreme Court formally declared an end to occupation, saying Israel "had no effective control over what occurred" in Gaza. The United Nations, Human Rights Watch and many other bodies still consider Israel the occupying power. Their reason is that Israel controls the airspace and territorial waters of the Gaza Strip, and the movement of people and goods in or out by air or sea.

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• 7. The Negotiating Table

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  For the PLO to take part in diplomacy, it had to disavow terrorism and recognize Israel's "right to exist." That meant giving up the aim of reclaiming all of historic Palestine and focusing on the 22 percent that came under Israeli military control in 1967. By the late 1970s, Palestinian leaders in the occupied territories and most Arab states backed a two-state settlement. In 1981, Saudi Arabia put forward such a plan with Arab League support. The Israeli analyst Avner Yaniv describes Arafat as ready for a historic compromise, a "peace offensive." The Israeli cabinet still opposed a Palestinian state. Yaniv argues that Israel responded by planning to remove the PLO as a negotiating partner, and invaded Lebanon the following year.

  The 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence formalized the goal the PLO had pursued since the mid-1970s. It envisioned a state in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, within the 1949 armistice lines that existed before the 5th of June 1967. Arafat then denounced all forms of terrorism and accepted UN Resolutions 242 and 338, as well as Israel's right to exist. Every condition Henry Kissinger had set for American negotiations with the PLO was now met. Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir was unmoved. He called the PLO a terrorist organization and opposed withdrawal, talks with the PLO and a Palestinian state. He saw the American decision to talk with the PLO as a mistake.

  In 1993, Yitzhak Rabin for Israel and Yasser Arafat for the PLO signed the Declaration of Principles, known as Oslo I. A crucial step was Arafat's letter recognizing Israel's right to exist. Critics point to an asymmetry, since Israel was not required to recognize a Palestinian state. Key issues were left to "final status" talks, and the talks along the lines discussed in Madrid in 1991 have never taken place. The incremental approach was meant to build confidence, but mutual confidence declined instead. Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, observed that life grew harsher for Palestinians as land was expropriated and settlements expanded. Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami said Oslo legitimized "the transformation of the West Bank into what has been called a 'cartographic cheeseboard'." Rabin himself reportedly said that Palestinians would be better at internal security than Israel "because they will allow no appeals to the Supreme Court and will prevent human rights groups from criticizing the conditions there."

  In July 2000, President Bill Clinton convened a summit at Camp David between Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Barak reportedly offered a non-militarized Palestinian state in three or four parts, with 87-92% of the West Bank. Israel would keep 69 settlements, which hold 85% of the West Bank's settlers. There would be no right of return to Israel, no sovereignty over the Temple Mount or core East Jerusalem neighborhoods, and continued Israeli control of the Jordan Valley. Arafat rejected the offer. Palestinian negotiators, Israeli analysts and Ben-Ami called it "unacceptable."

  Afterward a narrative took hold, backed by Barak, Ben-Ami and American officials including Dennis Ross and Madeleine Albright. It held that Arafat had turned down a generous offer and incited a violent uprising instead. The view was widely accepted in American and Israeli public opinion. Nearly all scholars and most Israeli and American officials involved in the talks have rejected it. They include the IDF chief of staff, the head of its intelligence bureau and the head of the Shin Bet. Ben-Ami later said the Clinton parameters were "the best proof that Arafat was right to turn down the summit's offers."

  Clinton presented his own plan on the 23rd of December 2000. It proposed a sovereign Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and 94-96 percent of the West Bank, plus land swaps equal to 1-3 percent. On Jerusalem it held that "Arab areas are Palestinian and that Jewish areas are Israeli." Palestinians would have sovereignty over the Temple Mount, and Israelis over the Western Wall. Both sides accepted the plan with reservations. At Taba, Egypt, in January 2001, they issued a joint statement: "The sides declare that they have never been closer to reaching an agreement and it is thus our shared belief that the remaining gaps could be bridged with the resumption of negotiations following the Israeli elections." Ariel Sharon defeated Barak and became prime minister on the 7th of February 2001. His government chose not to resume high-level talks.

  The Arab Peace Initiative, also called the Saudi Initiative, was proposed by Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at the Beirut summit and published on the 28th of March 2002. It offered full normalization with Israel in exchange for withdrawal from all occupied territories, including the Golan Heights. It also called for an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital and a "just solution" for refugees. The Arab League agreed to it again at the 2007 Riyadh summit. Arafat's Palestinian Authority embraced it, and so did his successor Mahmoud Abbas. Hamas was deeply divided, and most factions rejected it. Sharon called it a "non-starter." Ehud Olmert gave it a cautious welcome, and Benjamin Netanyahu expressed tentative support in 2015 but rejected it as a basis for talks in 2018.

  The Quartet of the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and the United States presented the Road Map for Peace on the 17th of September 2002. It left Jerusalem and the settlements for later phases. It never moved past its first phase, which called for a halt to settlement construction and to violence. Neither goal had been achieved as of November 2015. The Annapolis Conference met at the United States Naval Academy in Maryland on the 27th of November 2007. Mahmoud Abbas and Ehud Olmert then exchanged competing proposals, and no agreement followed. In September 2020, Palestinians criticized the normalization agreements that Israel signed with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. They called the Emirati move "a betrayal."

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• 8. Gaza and the Courts

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  In 2006, Hamas won a plurality of 44% in the Palestinian parliamentary election. Israel said it would impose economic sanctions unless Hamas accepted earlier agreements, renounced violence and recognized Israel's right to exist. Hamas rejected all three conditions. A struggle between Fatah and Hamas then erupted into the 2007 Battle of Gaza, and Hamas took full control. Israel imposed a naval blockade that year, and cooperation with Egypt allowed a ground blockade on the Egyptian border. In late 2008, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead. It caused thousands of civilian casualties and billions of dollars in damage. A ceasefire followed in February 2009.

  Israel's closure of Gaza had begun in 1991, when Gazans were first required to obtain permits to leave. Since 2006, Israel has enforced an explicit policy of separating the West Bank from Gaza. The Harvard political economist Sara Roy describes it as driven by Israeli rejection of territorial compromise, and as undermining Palestinian unity. Israeli officials described the tightened blockade as "economic warfare." By April 2010, only 73 commercial items could enter Gaza, compared with 4,000 before the blockade. The Israeli rights group Gisha says the policy was explicitly punitive. In 2008, Israeli officials calculated the calories each Gazan needed, and Gisha obtained the details through a court application. Israel's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories said the scheme was never formally adopted, which Gisha did not accept. Of 120,000 people in Gaza's private sector, 100,000 lost their jobs, and export truckloads fell to 2% of their earlier number.

  Israel's Military Advocate General argued that a blockade of an enemy is justified under international law, because Hamas had turned Gaza into a launching pad for mortar and rocket attacks on southern Israel. On the 20th of June 2010, after the Gaza flotilla raid, Israel's Security Cabinet approved a looser system allowing practically all non-military and non-dual-use items to enter. Exports stayed nearly banned. In 2011 a Palestinian Authority attempt to win full UN membership failed. In November 2012, Palestine's UN status was upgraded to non-member observer state, and its title became "State of Palestine." A new war in 2014 left over 70 Israeli and over 2,000 Palestinian casualties.

  In a July 2024 advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice found that the Palestinian territories form one political unit. It ruled that Israel's occupation since 1967, its settlements and its use of natural resources are illegal under international law, and that Israel should pay full reparations. The court also rejected the Israeli view that the 2005 disengagement ended the occupation of Gaza. The international community considers settlements illegal, while Israel disputes this, citing Articles 2 and 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and UN Security Council Resolution 242. As of 2023, about 500,000 Israeli settlers lived in the West Bank and another 200,000 in East Jerusalem. In February 2023, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich took charge of most of the Civil Administration. In the first six months of 2023-13,000 housing units were built in settlements, almost three times the total for all of 2022.

  In April 2021, Human Rights Watch released A Threshold Crossed, which concluded that Israeli policies toward Palestinians amount to the crime of apartheid. Amnesty International reached a similar finding in a report released on the 1st of February 2022. Others disagree. The head of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Israel rejects the charge, and in 2023 the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution calling it "absurd." The 2018 Nation-State law drew the nickname "Apartheid law" from the Israeli legal group Adalah. It states that national self-determination in Israel is "unique to the Jewish people." In July 2024, the ICJ found that Israeli policies violate the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. The law professor Solon Solomon said the court hesitated to opine on the apartheid claim itself.

  After the 2014 war and a crisis in 2021, Hamas began planning an attack. In 2022, Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power at the head of a hardline far-right government. On the 7th of October 2023, Hamas-led militant groups attacked southern Israel from Gaza. More than 1,195 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage. Israel declared war on Hamas, with heavy aerial bombardment and then a ground invasion. Its stated goals were destroying Hamas, freeing the hostages and controlling security in Gaza afterward. South Africa accused Israel of genocide at the International Court of Justice. The court ordered Israel to prevent any acts contrary to the 1948 Genocide Convention, but did not order it to suspend its campaign.

  The war spread across the region. Israel clashed with militias in the West Bank, with Hezbollah in Lebanon and with Iranian-backed groups in Syria, as well as with Iran itself. The Houthis blockaded the Red Sea, and the United States responded with airstrikes in Yemen, Iraq and Syria. In November 2024, Syrian opposition groups launched an offensive that ended with the fall of the Assad regime. Inside Gaza, the war brought widespread destruction, a humanitarian crisis and a famine, and forced most of the population from their homes. Many human rights organizations and scholars of genocide studies and international law say Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, though some dispute this. More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed, almost half of them women and children, and more than 148,000 injured. A study in The Lancet estimated 64,260 deaths from traumatic injuries by June 2024. It noted that the toll could be larger once indirect deaths were counted, and a comparable figure as of May 2025 would be 93,000.

  On the 9th of September 2025, Israeli airstrikes targeted senior Hamas leaders in Doha. Reports differed over whether the leaders survived. Three days later, the UN General Assembly adopted the New York Declaration by a vote of 142 in favour, 10 opposed and 12 abstentions. It endorses concrete steps toward a two-state solution and calls for a Palestinian government free of Hamas control. As of April 2026, a ceasefire has largely been in effect since the 10th of October 2025. The last living hostages were returned that month, and the last body was recovered by January 2026.

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