Key Dates of the Conflict

Every argument about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an argument about dates: which year things began, which event counts as the cause and which as the response. This page is the journal's dated reference, a timeline of the events the record treats as turning points, written so each entry can be checked against primary documentation. Dates are given as the record gives them; contested names are noted rather than settled.

Before the state: 1917 to 1948

1917: the Balfour Declaration states British support for a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. 1920 and 1921: the first major intercommunal riots under the Mandate. 1929: the Hebron massacre and the wider riots. 1936 to 1939: the Arab revolt against the Mandate; the Peel Commission proposes partition in 1937 and is rejected by both sides. November 1947: General Assembly Resolution 181 recommends partition into two states. May 1948: the State of Israel is declared; the war that follows ends in 1949 with Israel on 78 percent of the Mandate territory, the West Bank under Jordan, Gaza under Egypt, and about 700,000 Palestinian refugees. Israelis mark the war as independence; Palestinians commemorate it as the Nakba, the catastrophe. Both names belong to the record.

Occupation and organisation: 1956 to 1987

1956: the Suez war. 1964: the Palestine Liberation Organization is founded. June 1967: the Six-Day War leaves Israel controlling the West Bank including East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai and the Golan Heights; Resolution 242 follows that November. 1973: the October war and the oil shock. 1974: the Arab League names the PLO sole representative of the Palestinians and Arafat addresses the UN. 1978 and 1979: the Camp David accords and the Egypt-Israel treaty, the first Arab-Israeli peace. 1982: the Lebanon war and the Sabra and Shatila massacre. December 1987: the first intifada begins, a mass uprising that changes the conflict's methods and its audience.

The Oslo decade: 1988 to 2000

1988: the PLO's declaration of independence accepts a state alongside Israel; the United States opens a dialogue with the PLO. 1991: the Madrid conference. September 1993: the Oslo Declaration of Principles is signed on the White House lawn; mutual recognition follows. 1994: the Jordan-Israel treaty; the Palestinian Authority is established. November 1995: Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated in Tel Aviv. 1996 onward: suicide bombing campaigns, Israeli redeployments and expansion of settlements proceed in parallel, and the five-year Oslo timetable passes without a permanent agreement. July 2000: the Camp David summit ends without a deal; September 2000: the second intifada begins.

Disengagement and division: 2001 to 2014

2001: the Clinton parameters and the Taba talks; the second intifada's worst years follow, with thousands of Palestinian and hundreds of Israeli dead by its documented end around 2005. 2002: the Arab Peace Initiative offers full normalisation for a full withdrawal; Israel builds the West Bank barrier. 2005: Israel's disengagement removes its settlements and forces from Gaza. 2006: Hamas wins the Palestinian legislative election; the Lebanon war follows in July. June 2007: Hamas takes control of Gaza; Israel and Egypt impose the restrictions documented in the Gaza blockade explainer. 2007 and 2008: the Annapolis round ends with Olmert's resignation. 2008-2009, 2012 and 2014: three Gaza wars, the last the deadliest for the territory to that date.

Stalemate and rupture: 2015 to 2026

2018: the American embassy moves to Jerusalem; the nation-state law passes in Israel. 2020: the Abraham Accords normalise Israel's ties with the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan, explicitly outside the Palestinian track. May 2021: an eleven-day Gaza conflict and unprecedented intercommunal violence inside Israel's mixed cities. October 7, 2023: the Hamas attack kills about 1,200 people in Israel and takes roughly 250 hostages; the Gaza war that follows kills tens of thousands and displaces most of the Strip's population. 2024 and 2025: ceasefire phases and hostage exchanges alternate with resumed fighting; a wave of states recognises Palestine while the Israeli government advances annexationist positions in the West Bank. As of September 2026 the war's end-state arrangements remain unsettled, and the framework argument continues in the two-state history.

Where the timeline disagrees with itself

Two readers can check every date here and still disagree about the list, because the selection is the argument. One tradition begins the conflict in 1948, another in 1967, another in 1917, and the choice of a first entry is itself a position. This journal includes all three starting points and lets the record argue the case.

How to use this timeline

A date in this list is a floor, not a ceiling: each entry exists to anchor a claim that can be checked, not to replace the reading. The questions the timeline raises sit in the rest of the context section, the people still working inside it are in the peacebuilding section, and the campaigns that argued over its interpretation are in the campaigns section.