Palestinians

Palestinians, also known as Palestinians or Palestinian Arabs, are an ethnonational group consisting of the contemporary descendants of the peoples that have resided in Palestine continuously for thousands of years and who are primarily Arab in culture and language.

Despite many wars and exoduses (such as the one that occurred in 1948), about one-half of the world's Palestinian population continues to live in ancient Palestine, which includes the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Israel. As of 2005, Palestinians constituted 49 percent of the total population of this combined area, which included the entire population of the Gaza Strip (1.865 million), the majority of the population of the West Bank (approximately 2,785,000 versus approximately 600,000 Jewish Israeli citizens, which includes approximately 200,000 in East Jerusalem), and nearly 21 percent of the population of Israel proper as Arab citizens of Israel. Palestinian refugees and internally displaced Palestinians constitute a large proportion of the population, with more than a million living in the Gaza Strip, about 750,000 in the West Bank, and approximately 250,000 in Israel proper. More than half of the Palestinian people who reside abroad, known as the Palestinian diaspora, are stateless, meaning they do not have citizenship in any nation other than their own. Between 2.1 and 3.24 million people from the diaspora live as refugees in neighbouring Jordan, over 1 million people live between Syria and Lebanon, and approximately 750,000 people live in Saudi Arabia, with Chile's half a million people representing the largest concentration outside the Middle East, according to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees.