The West Bank is the larger of the two Palestinian territories (the other being the Gaza Strip) that make up Palestine. A landlocked territory located on the western bank of the Jordan River near the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in West Asia's Levant region, it is bordered by Jordan and the Dead Sea to the east, and by Israel (via the Green Line) to the south, west, and north. Since 1967, the territory has been under Israeli occupation, which is illegal under international law.
The territory first emerged in the wake of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War as a region occupied and subsequently annexed by Jordan. Jordan ruled the territory until the 1967 Six-Day War, when it was occupied by Israel. Since then, Israel has administered the West Bank (except for East Jerusalem, which was effectively annexed in 1980) as the Judea and Samaria Area. Jordan continued to claim the territory as its own until 1988. The mid-1990s Oslo Accords split the West Bank into three regional levels of Palestinian sovereignty, via the Palestinian National Authority (PNA): Area A (PNA), Area B (PNA and Israel), and Area C (Israel, comprising 60% of the West Bank). The PNA exercises total or partial civil administration over 165 Palestinian enclaves across the three areas.
The West Bank remains central to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The Palestinians consider it the heart of their envisaged state, along with the Gaza Strip. Right-wing and religious Israelis see it as their ancestral homeland, with numerous biblical sites. There is a push among some Israelis for partial or complete annexation of this land. Additionally, it is home to a rising number of Israeli settlers. Area C contains 230 Israeli settlements where Israeli law is applied. Under the Oslo Accords this area was to be mostly transferred to the PNA by 1997, but that did not occur. The international community considers Israeli settlements in the West Bank to be illegal under international law. Citing the 1980 law in which Israel claimed Jerusalem as its capital, the 1994 Israel–Jordan peace treaty, and the Oslo Accords, a 2004 advisory ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) concluded that the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, remains Israeli-occupied territory. In 2024 the ICJ again ruled that Israel's occupation of the West Bank is unlawful, adding that its conduct also violates the international prohibition on racial segregation and apartheid.
The West Bank has a land area of about . It has an estimated population of 2,747,943 Palestinians and over 670,000 Israeli settlers, of which approximately 220,000 live in East Jerusalem.
Terminology The name West Bank emerged to refer to the territory that was occupied in 1948 and annexed in 1950 by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, to distinguish it from Jordanian territory east of the Jordan River. It is a translation of the Arabic term (), "the Western Bank"; the Hebrew equivalent is . West Bank has much wider international recognition than Judea and Samaria, and has been used in international agreements including the Oslo Accords. It is also the internationally recognized term for the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory west of the Jordan River. The neo-Latin name Cisjordan, meaning "on this side of the Jordan", is used in several Romance languages and sometimes in academic writing for territory west of the Jordan River.
The names Judea and Samaria refer to historical and biblical regions in the southern and northern parts of the central highlands, respectively. Following the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in 1967, the first two orders issued by the Israeli Military Governorate referred to the territory as the "Occupied West Bank"; in December 1967, beginning with military order no. 187, Israeli authorities used the term Judea and Samaria, and the Judea and Samaria Area is now Israel's official administrative designation for the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem. The term Judea and Samaria is politically contested: according to Encyclopædia Britannica, its use is associated with the Israeli right and with those who assert a historical right to settle and annex the West Bank, while supporters of a two-state solution continue to use West Bank as the internationally defined term. Ian Lustick argues that the modern West Bank is not identical to Judea and Samaria, whose historical boundaries do not align with the territory defined by the 1949 armistice line.
History
From 1517 to 1917, the area now known as the West Bank was under Turkish rule, as part of Ottoman Syria. In the early Ottoman period, much of the northern West Bank, including the area of Jenin, and the hill country north of Nablus, formed part of the Turabay Emirate, a semi-autonomous Bedouin polity centred at Lajjun. The Turabay clan administered wide territories on behalf of the Ottoman sultans from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, collecting taxes and overseeing security along major trade routes. Their authority reflected the empire's reliance on local Arab elites to govern frontier districts, and the town of Lajjun became a regional administrative hub before its decline in the late seventeenth century.
In the late Ottoman period, the rural population of Palestine, including the West Bank hill country, expanded significantly. Villages grew in size, new hamlets were established, and peasants extended cultivation into previously marginal lands such as forests, marshes, and stony slopes. This process was part of a wider demographic recovery and agrarian commercialization in the region, which saw Palestinian peasants increasing grain production and integrating more fully into regional and international markets.
At the 1920 San Remo conference, the victorious Allies of World War I allocated the area to the British Mandate of Palestine (1920–1948). The San Remo Resolution, adopted on 25 April 1920, incorporated the Balfour Declaration of 1917. It and Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations were the basic documents upon which the British Mandate of Palestine was constructed. The United Kingdom proclaimed Abdullah I as emir of the Emirate of Transjordan on 11 April 1921. He declared it an independent Hashemite kingdom on 25 May 1946.
Under the United Nations in 1947, it was designated as part of a proposed Arab state by the Partition Plan for Palestine. UN Resolution 181 recommended the splitting of the British Mandate into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and an internationally administered enclave of Jerusalem. A broader region of the modern-day West Bank was assigned to the Arab state. The resolution designated the territory described as "the hill country of Samaria and Judea", the area now known as the "West Bank", as part of the proposed Arab state. Following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, this area was captured by Transjordan.
1948–1967: Jordanian West Bank
During the 1948 war, Israel occupied parts of what was designated in the UN partition plan as "Palestine". The 1949 Armistice Agreements defined the interim boundary between Israel and Jordan, essentially reflecting the battlefield after the war.General Armistice Agreement between the Hashemite Jordan Kingdom and Israel UN Doc S/1302/Rev.1 3 April 1949 Following the December 1948 Jericho Conference, Transjordan annexed the area west of the Jordan River in 1950, naming it "West Bank" or "Cisjordan", and designated the area east of the river as "East Bank" or "Transjordan". Jordan, as it was now known, ruled over the West Bank from 1948 until 1967. Jordan's annexation was never formally recognized by the international community, with the exception of the United Kingdom and Iraq.Joseph Massad said that the members of the Arab League granted de facto recognition and that the United States had formally recognized the annexation, except for Jerusalem. See Joseph A. Massad, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001),, page 229. Records show that the United States de facto accepted the annexation without formally recognizing it. United States Department of State / Foreign relations of the United States, 1950. The Near East, South Asia, and Africa pg. 921It is often stated that Pakistan recognized it as well, but that seems to be incorrect; see S. R. Silverburg, Pakistan and the West Bank: A research note, Middle Eastern Studies, 19:2 (1983) 261–263.George Washington University. Law School (2005). The George Washington international law review. George Washington University. p. 390. Retrieved 21 December 2010. Jordan's illegal occupation and Annexation of the West Bank King Abdullah of Jordan was crowned King of Jerusalem by the Coptic Bishop on 15 November 1948.Enrico Molinari,The Holy Places of Jerusalem in Middle East Peace Agreements: The Conflict Between Global and State Identities, Sussex Academic Press, 2010 p.92. Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, were granted Jordanian citizenship and half of the Jordanian Parliament seats, thus enjoying equal opportunities in all sectors of the state.Armstrong, Karen. Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996. p. 387.
Many refugees continued to live in camps and relied on UNRWA assistance for sustenance. Palestinian refugees constituted more than a third of the kingdom's population of 1.5 million. The last Jordanian elections in which West Bank residents voted were those of April 1967. Their parliamentary representatives continued in office until 1988, when West Bank seats were abolished. Palestinians enjoyed equal opportunities in all sectors of the state without discrimination. Agriculture remained the primary activity of the territory. The West Bank, despite its smaller area, contained half of Jordan's agricultural land.
In 1966, 43% of the labour force of 55,000 worked in agriculture, and 2,300 km2 were under cultivation. In 1965, 15,000 workers were employed in industry, producing 7% of the GNP. This number fell after the 1967 war and was not surpassed until 1983. The tourism industry played an important role. 26 branches of 8 Arab banks were present. The Jordanian dinar became legal tender and remains so until today. 80% of Jordan's fruit-growing land and 40% of its vegetables lay in the West Bank. With the onset of the occupation, the area could no longer produce export earnings.
On the eve of occupation, the West Bank accounted for 40% of Jordanian GNP, between 34% and 40% of its agricultural output, and almost half of its manpower, though only a third of Jordanian investment was allocated to it and mainly to the private housing construction sector. Even though its per-capita product was 10 times greater than that of the West Bank, the Israeli economy on the eve of occupation had experienced two years (1966–1967) of a sharp recession.
Immediately after the occupation, from 1967 to 1974, the economy boomed. In 1967, the Palestinian economy had a gross domestic product of $1,349 per capita for a million people. The West Bank's population was 585,500, of whom 18% were refugees, and was growing annually by 2%. West Bank growth, compared to Gaza (3%), had lagged, due to the effect of mass emigration of West Bankers seeking employment in Jordan. As agriculture gave way to industrial development in Israel, in the West Bank the former still generated 37% of domestic product, and industry a mere 13%.
The growth rate of the West Bank economy in the period of the Jordanian rule of the West Bank, before Israeli occupation, had risen at an annual rate of 6–8%. This rate of growth was indispensable if the post-war West Bank were to achieve economic self-reliance.
1967–present: Israeli Military Governorate and Civil Administration