HERA · Human Entity Reference Atlas by Masego Inc

The land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean has one of the longest recorded human histories anywhere. Jericho, in the Jordan Valley, holds remains of a walled Neolithic settlement with a stone tower dating to roughly the ninth millennium BCE, among the oldest known anywhere, and was inscribed by UNESCO in 2023. Canaanite city-states, the Israelite and Judahite kingdoms, and Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian empires succeeded one another; the Romans made the territory the province of Judaea and, after the revolt of 132 to 135 CE, renamed it Syria Palaestina, the origin of the modern name. Arab Muslim forces took Jerusalem in 637, and the Umayyads built the Dome of the Rock in 691. Crusader rule from 1099 gave way to Saladin in 1187, then to the Ayyubids, Mamluks and, from 1516, four centuries of Ottoman administration. Britain took the territory in 1917 and governed it under a League of Nations mandate from 1920, during which the Balfour Declaration's promise of a Jewish national home, Jewish immigration and Arab resistance — culminating in the revolt of 1936 to 1939 — set the terms of the conflict. The United Nations partition plan of 1947 was followed by the war of 1948, in which Israel was established and roughly 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled, an event remembered as the Nakba. Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967.

Palestinian culture is Levantine Arab in language, food and custom, and is marked throughout by the experience of dispossession and by the value placed on sumud — steadfastness, the refusal to leave or to be erased, expressed as much through staying on land and tending it as through politics. The extended family and the hamula clan remain the organising social unit, and hospitality is close to obligatory. Society is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim, with a Christian minority of well under one percent that is nonetheless historically central, concentrated in Bethlehem, Beit Jala, Ramallah and Jerusalem and belonging mostly to the Greek Orthodox, Latin and Melkite churches. The olive is the master symbol and a real economic mainstay: the October harvest empties towns as families go to the groves, and olive oil, olives and Nablus soap are both staples and emblems. The keffiyeh, the black-and-white cotton headcloth, became an international symbol of the national cause. Refugee camps established in 1948 and 1967 have become dense urban neighbourhoods that retain the names of the villages their residents came from, and the house key kept from a lost village is a recurring image in Palestinian art and memory. Literature and poetry carry unusual public weight, with Mahmoud Darwish read as a national voice.

Palestine has four UNESCO World Heritage sites, all inscribed since it joined the organisation in 2011. The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and its pilgrimage route, built over the traditional birthplace of Jesus, was inscribed in 2012 as the first Palestinian listing. Battir, southwest of Jerusalem, was inscribed in 2014 for its Roman-era terraces and a communal irrigation system in which eight families still rotate spring water on a schedule maintained for centuries. The old town of Hebron, with the Ibrahimi Mosque over the Tomb of the Patriarchs, followed in 2017, and Tell es-Sultan, ancient Jericho, in 2023. On the intangible heritage list are the Palestinian hikaye, the women's oral storytelling tradition, inscribed in 2008; the art of embroidery in Palestine, its practices, skills and knowledge, inscribed in 2021; and the making of Nablus olive-oil soap, added in 2024. Jericho is among the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the world. Palestinian literacy rates are among the highest in the Arab world, and the diaspora has produced disproportionate international achievement in scholarship, medicine and business. In 2025 the documentary No Other Land, made by a Palestinian-Israeli directing team, won the Academy Award for best documentary feature.

Few places have been layered by as many civilisations. Canaanite, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk and Ottoman rule each left building, vocabulary and custom, visible in the Roman street grid beneath Jerusalem, the Umayyad architecture of the Haram al-Sharif, Crusader masonry reused in Palestinian villages, and Ottoman-era soap factories and khans in Nablus and Hebron. Jerusalem's Old City is quartered between Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Armenian communities, the last present continuously for some sixteen centuries. Near Nablus, on Mount Gerizim, the Samaritans survive as one of the smallest ancient religious communities in the world, numbering only in the hundreds and speaking both Arabic and Hebrew. The diaspora runs the exchange outward: Palestinian communities in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the Gulf are large, and Chile hosts the biggest Palestinian community outside the Arab world, descended largely from Christian emigrants from the Bethlehem area, with its own football club, Club Deportivo Palestino, founded in 1920. Palestinian cuisine, music and embroidery are shared with the wider Levant while retaining strongly regional local forms, and the Hebrew widely spoken by Palestinians who work in or were educated near Israel is itself a product of the last several decades of proximity.

The dabke is the definitive Palestinian dance: a line of dancers shoulder to shoulder, led by a lawweeh at the head of the line who improvises while the others stamp a driving rhythm in unison, performed at weddings and festivals and read as an assertion of rootedness. It is accompanied by the mijwiz double-pipe, the shubbabeh flute, the tabla and the daff frame drum, while the classical Arab repertoire uses oud, qanun and nay. Sung poetry is a major form: the improvised competitive verse of zajal, the ataaba and mijana song patterns, and the wedding songs performed by women. The hikaye, women's oral storytelling in a distinctive narrative dialect, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2008. Modern Palestinian music has moved along several tracks — the committed song of Sabreen and Rim Banna; the hip hop of DAM, founded in Lod in the late 1990s and among the first Arabic-language rap groups; the international concert career of Le Trio Joubran, three oud-playing brothers from Nazareth; and mainstream Arab pop, in which Mohammed Assaf, a singer from Khan Younis in Gaza, won Arab Idol in 2013 and became a national celebrity overnight. The Edward Said National Conservatory of Music trains students in Ramallah, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nablus and Gaza.

Palestinian food is Levantine, built on olive oil, wheat, lamb, chickpeas, yoghurt and vegetables, with strong regional variation between the hill country, the coast and the desert margins. The dish most often named as national is musakhan: taboon flatbread soaked in olive oil and heaped with onions slowly cooked in sumac, topped with roast chicken and toasted pine nuts, eaten with the hands and traditionally made at the olive harvest to use the season's new oil. Maqluba, meaning upside-down, is a pot of rice layered with fried aubergine, cauliflower and meat that is inverted onto a platter to serve. Maftoul is the hand-rolled Palestinian couscous, larger and chewier than the North African kind, served in a chickpea and chicken broth. Za'atar, the blend of wild thyme, sumac and sesame, is eaten daily with oil and bread. Gaza's cooking is distinctly hotter, using red chilli and dill seed in dishes such as sumagiyya, a sumac-and-chard stew, the fiery crushed-tomato salad dagga, and clay-pot shrimp. The most famous sweet is knafeh Nabulsiyeh from Nablus — shredded pastry over stretchy white cheese, soaked in syrup and dyed orange. Nablus is equally known for its olive-oil soap, recognised by UNESCO in 2024.

The Palestinian thobe is a long embroidered dress whose cross-stitch work, tatreez, functions as a regional and biographical code: before 1948 an experienced eye could read a woman's village, marital status and relative wealth from the motifs, colours and placement of her embroidery. Ramallah dresses used dense red cross-stitch on white or natural linen; Bethlehem work is distinguished by couched gold and silver cord in a technique called malak; Hebron, Beit Dajan, Gaza and the Beersheba Bedouin each had their own vocabularies of cypress, moon, feather and amulet motifs. Headdresses were equally specific — the tall coin-covered shatweh of Bethlehem, the smadeh cap of Ramallah — and coins sewn onto them represented a woman's own property. UNESCO inscribed the art of embroidery in Palestine on its Representative List in 2021. Men traditionally wore the qumbaz, a long striped coat, with a sash, and the head is covered by the keffiyeh or hatta, held by a black agal; the black-and-white pattern, associated with the 1936 revolt and later with Yasser Arafat, became a global political symbol, and the Hirbawi factory in Hebron, opened in 1961, is the last that still weaves it in Palestine.

Football is the national sport by a wide margin. The Palestine Football Association was admitted to FIFA in 1998, and separate leagues operate in the West Bank and Gaza because players cannot reliably travel between them — a division that has repeatedly forced the national team to assemble abroad or to play without members of its own squad. The Faisal Al-Husseini International Stadium at Al-Ram, north of Jerusalem, opened in 2008 as the first home ground able to host international fixtures, and the team also plays home matches in neighbouring countries. Palestine won the AFC Challenge Cup in 2014, which earned a first qualification for the AFC Asian Cup in 2015, and it has qualified for each edition since; at the 2023 tournament, played in Qatar in January 2024, it advanced from the group stage to the knockout rounds for the first time. Women's football has grown through the national team and a domestic league. Beyond football, participation sports include basketball, volleyball, athletics, taekwondo, karate and swimming, organised through clubs and the Palestine Olympic Committee. Equestrian sport has a following in the West Bank, and sport in Gaza has been severely curtailed by the destruction of facilities during the current war.

Palestinians place unusual weight on education, and literacy rates are among the highest in the Arab world despite the conditions — a pattern often explained by a dispossessed population investing in portable qualifications. Schooling is compulsory and free through the basic stage, and culminates in the Tawjihi secondary certificate, whose results are a national event. A large parallel system is run by UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestine refugees, which operates several hundred schools across the West Bank and Gaza and educates hundreds of thousands of refugee children. Higher education expanded rapidly from the 1970s: Birzeit University near Ramallah, which grew from a girls' school founded in 1924, is the oldest and most prominent; An-Najah National University in Nablus is the largest; Bethlehem University was founded in 1973 in the Lasallian Catholic tradition; and Al-Quds University serves the Jerusalem area. In Gaza, the Islamic University of Gaza, Al-Azhar University and Al-Aqsa University were the principal institutions. Universities have historically been disrupted by closures, checkpoint delays and detentions of students and staff, and United Nations and UNESCO assessments have documented severe damage to and destruction of schools and university buildings across Gaza during the war that began in 2023.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the defining fact of Palestinian political life. The 1948 war produced the Nakba and a refugee population that, with descendants, UNRWA now registers in the millions; the 1967 war brought the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza under Israeli military occupation. The First Intifada from 1987 led to the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995, which created the Palestinian Authority and divided the West Bank into Areas A, B and C, but left borders, Jerusalem, settlements and refugees to final-status talks that never concluded. The Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005 was far more violent, and Israel withdrew settlers and soldiers from Gaza in 2005. Hamas won legislative elections in 2006 and took sole control of Gaza in 2007, splitting Palestinian governance and prompting an Israeli and Egyptian blockade; major rounds of fighting followed in 2008-09, 2012, 2014 and 2021. The Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, which killed around 1,200 people and took some 250 hostages, triggered an Israeli military campaign in Gaza of unprecedented scale, with tens of thousands of deaths recorded by the Gaza health ministry, near-total displacement of the population and UN-assessed famine conditions. The International Court of Justice held in July 2024 that Israel's continued presence in the occupied territory is unlawful, and is hearing a genocide case brought by South Africa.

Almost every element of Palestine's external status is disputed. Borders are the first: Palestinians and most of the international community take the 1949 armistice line, the Green Line, as the basis for a state in the West Bank and Gaza, while Israeli settlement construction beyond that line — held unlawful by the International Court of Justice and by United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 of 2016 — has placed hundreds of thousands of settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Jerusalem is claimed as capital by both sides; Israel annexed the eastern city in 1980 in a move the Security Council declared null and void, and the Haram al-Sharif, also the Temple Mount, is the single most sensitive site. The status and right of return of the refugees registered by UNRWA is a core final-status issue on which the two positions are furthest apart. Water allocation from the shared Mountain Aquifer, governed by an interim Oslo arrangement never replaced, remains contested, as does control of Area C, which covers around sixty percent of the West Bank. The separation barrier, most of which runs inside the West Bank rather than on the Green Line, was held contrary to international law in an ICJ advisory opinion in 2004. The blockade and control of Gaza's crossings, airspace and coastal waters is disputed in both law and practice.

The two Palestinian territories are separated by Israel and are geographically unlike each other. The West Bank is dominated by a limestone highland ridge running north to south through Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Hebron, reaching around a thousand metres, terraced for olives, grapes and stone fruit and receiving reasonable winter rain. East of the ridge the land falls sharply into the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea, whose surface at roughly 430 metres below sea level is the lowest land point on Earth; the descent compresses Mediterranean, steppe and desert conditions into a few dozen kilometres, and the eastern slopes and the Jericho basin are true desert. The Gaza Strip is entirely different: a flat coastal plain about 41 kilometres long and between six and twelve kilometres wide, roughly 365 square kilometres in total, with dunes, a Mediterranean shoreline and one of the highest population densities in the world. The climate throughout is Mediterranean, with hot dry summers and rain falling almost entirely between November and March. Water is the binding physical constraint: the Mountain Aquifer under the West Bank is shared and its allocation disputed, and Gaza's coastal aquifer has been over-extracted to the point that the great majority of its groundwater is too saline or contaminated to drink.

Leisure is intensely social and family-centred, and it is also shaped by a permit and checkpoint system that makes movement between towns, and above all between the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza, difficult or impossible for most people — so much of it happens close to home. Weekends bring extended-family gatherings, long meals, coffee and argileh in cafés, and picnics in the hills. The olive harvest in October is the great communal event of the year, drawing families and volunteers back to the groves. Football is played on every open surface and followed closely, both the local leagues and European clubs. Ramallah has developed the most active cultural nightlife, with restaurants, bars and a summer festival calendar; Bethlehem fills at Christmas; Jericho and the Dead Sea are the winter warm-weather escape, and Gaza's Mediterranean beach was, before the current war, the main open space available to its population. Hiking has grown through marked long-distance routes, particularly the Masar Ibrahim al-Khalil, which runs some 330 kilometres along the length of the West Bank through villages that host walkers. The Palestine Marathon, run in Bethlehem each spring since 2013 under the slogan Right to Movement, doubles as sport and protest.

Palestinian visual art has been shaped by exile and by the problem of representing a contested land. Ismail Shammout, a refugee from Lydda, set the terms of a figurative national art from the 1950s; the New Visions group of the 1980s — Sliman Mansour, Nabil Anani, Vera Tamari and Tayseer Barakat — went further, boycotting Israeli art supplies during the First Intifada and working instead in mud, henna, leather and straw, a constraint that became a style. Naji al-Ali, assassinated in London in 1987, created Handala, the barefoot ten-year-old drawn from behind with his hands clasped, who has become the most reproduced Palestinian image of all. Later generations work internationally: Mona Hatoum, born in Beirut to a Palestinian family, was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1995 for installations of domestic objects turned menacing; Emily Jacir won the Golden Lion for a young artist at the Venice Biennale in 2007; Larissa Sansour works in science fiction film. The Palestinian Museum opened at Birzeit in 2016. In literature, Mahmoud Darwish is the national poet and Ghassan Kanafani the defining novelist, while Edward Said reshaped literary and postcolonial criticism worldwide. Palestinian cinema has twice been nominated for the foreign-language Academy Award, through Hany Abu-Assad's Paradise Now and Omar, and the documentary No Other Land won in 2025.

Mahmoud Darwish, who died in 2008, is read as the national poet, and his work moved from resistance verse toward a lyric meditation on exile that placed him among the major Arabic poets of the century. Edward Said, born in Jerusalem and professor at Columbia, wrote Orientalism in 1978, one of the most influential works of twentieth-century humanities scholarship, and co-founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra of Arab and Israeli musicians with Daniel Barenboim in 1999. Ghassan Kanafani, novelist and spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, wrote Men in the Sun before his assassination in Beirut in 1972. Yasser Arafat led the Palestine Liberation Organization from 1969, shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for the Oslo Accords, and headed the Palestinian Authority until his death in 2004; Mahmoud Abbas has been president since. Hanan Ashrawi, academic and legislator, was the principal Palestinian spokesperson at the Madrid talks of 1991. Naji al-Ali created Handala. In the arts and sciences, Mona Hatoum, Elia Suleiman and Hany Abu-Assad have international careers, and Mohammed Assaf became the best-known Palestinian singer of his generation. Among the diaspora, Palestinians have reached prominence in Chile, Jordan and the Gulf across business, medicine and politics.

Palestine's technological claims are mostly ancient or artisanal rather than modern and industrial, and the honest account says so. Its deepest is at Tell es-Sultan in Jericho, where excavation revealed a Neolithic settlement of the ninth millennium BCE with a massive stone wall and a solid round tower some eight metres high — among the earliest known monumental architecture anywhere, and evidence that people were building at scale and domesticating cereals near the very beginning of settled agriculture. The region was also part of the early development of glassmaking and of the alphabetic writing that spread from the Levantine coast. The best-documented continuing technique is Nablus soap, made since at least the tenth century by boiling virgin olive oil with an alkali traditionally derived from the ashes of the barilla plant brought from the eastern deserts, then cutting and stacking the slabs into ventilated conical towers to cure for months — a process UNESCO recognised in 2024. Palestinian terrace agriculture and its associated water systems, preserved at Battir, are a functioning ancient hydraulic technology. Taybeh Brewery, founded in 1994 in the West Bank, was the first Palestinian brewery and built a working export business under occupation conditions. Modern Palestinian technical activity is concentrated in software services rather than hardware invention.

Palestinian science and technology operate under constraints unusual for a middle-income society: import restrictions on dual-use laboratory equipment, limits on movement between institutions, and a telecommunications sector in which spectrum allocation requires Israeli approval — third-generation mobile service reached the West Bank only in 2018, and Gaza remained on second-generation networks for years afterwards. Within those limits the strongest sector is software and information services. Palestinian universities graduate a high number of engineering and computer science students relative to population, and an outsourcing and product industry developed around Ramallah, supported by the planned city of Rawabi and by accelerators including Gaza Sky Geeks, which trained developers and freelancers in the Strip. Research strengths at Birzeit, An-Najah and Al-Quds universities lie in water resources, agriculture, renewable energy and public health, all closely tied to practical scarcity: solar photovoltaic installation has spread widely because grid supply is unreliable, and desalination and wastewater treatment are central research questions in Gaza, where most groundwater is unfit to drink. Medical research is conducted through the university hospitals and in partnership with international agencies. United Nations and UNESCO assessments have documented the destruction of laboratories, universities and health infrastructure in Gaza since 2023, which will set the sector back by many years.