The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics enumerated 4,780,978 residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip on the census reference date of 1 December 2017, and Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counted 2.130 million Arab residents of Israel in September 2025, each body reporting its own official count. Two different questions sit inside the single word continuous: whether people have lived in the land without interruption, and whether the community now called Palestinian is as old as that habitation. The records answer them at different depths, and they diverge sharply on how far back either can be measured at all.
Key Findings
- The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics enumerated 4,780,978 residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in its 2017 census, 2,881,687 in the West Bank and 1,899,291 in Gaza, the third round after 1997 and 2007.
- Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counted 1.707 million Moslem residents at the end of 2021, 18.1% of all residents of Israel, and about 184,200 Christians in a preliminary December 2025 estimate.
- Benny Morris’s archival history (Cambridge University Press, 2004) puts at roughly 700,000 the Palestinians who left their homes during the 1948 war; Morris and Ilan Pappé (2006) disagree in print over how to characterise it.
- The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reports that nearly two million of roughly 2.2 million people living in Gaza before the war were displaced inside the Strip and roughly 100,000 left it, the authority’s own count for the end of 2025.
- The enumerated record for the territory begins with the 1997 census of 2,895,683 residents; World Bank values for the territory before 1997 are modelled rather than counted.
What do the counts record about Palestinians living in the land today?
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics counted 4,780,978 residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip on the census reference date of 1 December 2017, the third and most recent full census the authority has conducted. That figure is a de facto enumeration of people present, the Palestinian authority’s own official count, and it is the base from which every later total for the territory is projected.
The 2017 round split as 2,881,687 residents in the West Bank and 1,899,291 in the Gaza Strip. East Jerusalem could not be directly enumerated, so administrative estimates were used there. The previous round, in 1997, counted 2,895,683 residents of the same territory.
Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counts a separate population on its own definitions. In its September 2025 release it recorded about 10.148 million residents of Israel, of whom 2.130 million were counted as Arabs, a category the bureau defines as Moslems, Arab Christians and Druze, and 7.758 million as Jews and others. The remaining roughly 260,000 are recorded as foreign residents, counted in the total but outside those two groups. The bureau counts residents of East Jerusalem and West Bank settlers inside Israel’s total, a scope choice distinct from the convention international monitors use.
Neither series is a count of Palestinians worldwide. One enumerates residents present in the West Bank and Gaza on a single date; the other counts citizens and residents of Israel by religion and population group. Read together, they record several million people living in the land now, counted by two authorities that disagree about the boundaries of what they are counting.
Is it often said Palestinians descend from the land’s ancient inhabitants?
It is often said that today’s Palestinians descend from the land’s ancient inhabitants. The scholarship separates two claims that the sentence combines: continuity of habitation in the region, which the historical literature documents across successive periods, and continuity of a named national community, which the same literature places in the modern era. The enumerated population record starts far later, with the 2,895,683 residents counted in 1997.
The first claim is the one the documentary record supports without difficulty. The study “The Conception of Palestine from the Late Bronze Age to the Modern Era,” published in Holy Land Studies by Edinburgh University Press, traces the region’s designation and its inhabited history across successive imperial and administrative periods. It describes an inhabited region under changing names of rule, and it does not equate the region’s designation with an unbroken national community.
The second claim is where the dating is contested, and the contest is about the political category rather than the population. Encyclopaedia Britannica’s entries on the period after 1948 use “the Palestinians” as the standing designation for the Arabs of the former Mandate of Palestine, a modern political usage of the term for a population already living there. That usage carries no implication about when the population arrived.
The distinction matters because the two claims are answered by different kinds of evidence. Habitation is a question for archaeology, historical geography and administrative records. Descent is a question for genetics and genealogy. Identity is a question for the documentary history of political movements, parties, congresses and instruments. A single sentence asserting continuity from antiquity to the present asks all three to hold at once, and the sources that measure population, the censuses and the national statistical series, measure none of them: they count people alive on a stated date.
So the concession is straightforward and the record supports it. People have lived in this land continuously, and the enumerated populations described above are their present-day count. What the enumerated record cannot do is trace those people back to named ancient inhabitants, and the sections below set out both what the historical record does document and where the descent claim runs out of measurement.
How far back does the record use the name Palestine?
The designation Palestine appears in histories, inscriptions, maps and coins from classical antiquity through the modern era, per “The Conception of Palestine from the Late Bronze Age to the Modern Era” in Holy Land Studies (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), which cites among the earliest of those histories Herodotus in the fifth century BCE. The article describes a regional designation rather than a continuous national community.
That documentary chain establishes something narrower than it is often taken to establish, and something more durable. It establishes that a named region has been identified, mapped, minted and administered under that name across more than two millennia of written record, through classical, late antique, medieval, Ottoman and Mandate periods. The name attaches to territory and to its inhabitants as residents of that territory. It does not, in that literature, attach to a bounded national people with continuous political institutions.
Primary instruments from the twentieth century use the regional sense in the same way. Israel’s Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, published in Official Gazette Number 1 on 14 May 1948, recites the League of Nations Mandate and the United Nations General Assembly resolution of 29 November 1947 as steps concerning the territory, and appeals directly “to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel,” using inhabitants of a place rather than a national designation. That is the wording of the text the Knesset publishes in English.
The upshot for the question as put is that the antiquity of the name and the antiquity of the people are separate findings, and only the first is documented in the histories, inscriptions and coins the Edinburgh University Press study surveys. Anyone reading a claim that “Palestine has been called Palestine for 2,500 years” is reading a claim about a regional designation, and it is a claim that named scholarship supports. Anyone reading it as a claim about a continuous national community is reading past what the same scholarship says.
When did modern Palestinian national identity consolidate as a political category?
The United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 3236 on 22 November 1974, recognising the rights of the Palestinian people including the right to self-determination, the recorded point at which the Palestinian people entered a General Assembly instrument as a named political community. The resolution dates the recognition, not the population it recognises.
That distinction is the whole of the matter in this section. A recorded vote in 1974 documents when an international body named a people; it says nothing about how long that people had lived where they lived. Encyclopaedia Britannica’s treatment of the Arabs of the former Mandate of Palestine as “the Palestinians” reflects the same modern usage: a twentieth-century political designation applied to a population the same reference work describes as long resident in the territory.
The parallel case is instructive and appears in a primary text. Israel’s 1948 Declaration recites its own chain of national consolidation in the same modern window: the First Zionist Congress convened by Theodor Herzl in 1897, the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917, the League of Nations Mandate, and the General Assembly resolution of 29 November 1947. Read as a document about dates, the founding text of one national movement places that movement’s institutional beginnings in the fifty years before 1948.
Both national categories in this land, then, are documented in primary instruments as formations of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whatever the age of the populations they organised. A congress in 1897, a declaration in 1917, a state proclamation in 1948, a General Assembly resolution in 1974: these are the dated records of political consolidation, and they are separate from any record of who lived where in 1800 or in 400 BCE.
The claim that Palestinian national identity is modern and the claim that Palestinians are recent arrivals are therefore two different claims, resting on two different evidence types. The first has dated instruments behind it. The second is a claim about population, and population is what censuses measure.
What do Israel’s own statistics record about the non-Jewish population?
Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counted 1.707 million Moslem residents at the end of 2021, 18.1% of all residents of Israel, in its own media release compiling preliminary demographic data. The bureau publishes similar releases for each population group it defines, and every figure in them is the bureau’s own compiled count rather than an independent verification.
The same series records about 184,200 Christians living in Israel in a preliminary estimate for December 2025, about 1.9% of the state’s population, of whom 78.7% were Arab Christians at the end of 2024. The bureau’s Nabi Shu’ayb release put the Druze population at approximately 152,000 in February 2024, against 14,500 at the founding of the state. Its Israel in Figures compilation recorded a total population of 9,662,000 at the end of 2022.
Geography sits inside these counts. The bureau recorded 362,000 Moslem residents of Jerusalem at the end of 2021, 37.5% of the city’s residents and 21.2% of all Moslems in Israel. In its Christmas 2025 release it placed 68.3% of Arab Christians in the Northern District and 14.7% in the Haifa District, with Nazareth, Haifa, Jerusalem and Nof HaGalil the four largest Arab Christian localities at 18,900, 18,800, 13,400 and 10,800 residents respectively at the end of 2024.
Some of these figures are shares of their own group rather than of the country, and the bureau publishes them that way. The Christian estimate excludes Christians who do not appear in the Population Register, so it undercounts foreign nationals by the bureau’s own footnote. What the series records for the question at hand is an official, dated, state-published account of a substantial non-Jewish resident population living inside Israel, enumerated year after year by the statistical authority of the state that administers the territory it covers.
Where did 1948 interrupt continuity for individual families?
Benny Morris’s archival history “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited” (Cambridge University Press, 2004) puts at roughly 700,000 the Palestinians who left their homes during the 1948 war, an estimate drawn from Israeli military and state archives. That is where continuity of residence broke for a large share of families, whatever the continuity of presence in the land.
Morris attributes the exodus to multiple causes varying by locality and by phase of the war, including military attack and fear of attack, expulsions in certain sectors, and flight. He rejects both a single master expulsion plan and the account that departures were voluntary. Ilan Pappé's “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” (Oneworld, 2006) argues from the same period that the displacement was a planned ethnic cleansing. The two positions are a named disagreement between two historians working on the same decade, and neither is settled by the other; the 1948 displacement record sets out the archives and the instruments in detail.
The founding text of the state established that year addressed the population that remained. The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, published in Official Gazette Number 1 on 14 May 1948, appeals “to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions,” in the English text the Knesset publishes. The two Israeli government English translations of the Declaration differ on one word in its equality clause, the Knesset text reading “all its citizens” and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs text “all its inhabitants,” and the Hebrew is the original of both.
For the question as asked, 1948 is the point where the two senses of continuity come apart most sharply. The count of people present in the land continued: Israel’s own statistical series records the Moslem, Arab Christian and Druze populations enumerated above, and the Palestinian census rounds record the populations of the West Bank and Gaza. The count of families still living in the specific villages and towns where they had lived did not.
How many Palestinians today are registered refugees or their descendants?
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reports that nearly two million of the roughly 2.2 million people living in Gaza on the eve of the war were displaced inside the Strip, its own count published at the end of 2025. Displacement within the territory is not departure from it, and the two are recorded separately in that brief.
The same brief puts Gaza at about 2.13 million people at the end of 2025, a decline of approximately 254,000 people, which the bureau states is a decrease of 10.6% against pre-aggression population estimates, and attributes the change to war-related deaths, missing persons, reduced births and forced out-migration. Roughly 100,000 people, on the bureau’s account, have left the Strip. The figure is a demographic net decline reported by the Palestinian statistical authority, not a casualty count, and the brief separately relays 70,942 deaths attributed to the Palestinian Ministry of Health rather than measured by the bureau.
The peer-reviewed literature treats refugee and non-refugee Palestinians as distinguishable populations within the same territory. Al-Qudsi’s comparative profile in International Migration (2000) found Palestinian refugees in the West Bank and Gaza somewhat better educated than non-refugees while showing only slightly higher fertility, a comparison that presupposes both groups living in the same place under the same administration. The service population spans further: Hababeh and colleagues surveyed Palestine refugee mothers attending clinics in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria between June and December 2015, reported as a conference abstract in a Lancet supplement (2018).
No registration total appears in this record as an established figure, so the share of Palestinians today who are registered refugees or their descendants is not stated here. What the enumerated and peer-reviewed sources do establish is that displacement has repeatedly moved people within the land as well as out of it, and that the populations counted in the West Bank and Gaza include both those displaced in earlier decades and their descendants.
Is the population in the land growing or shrinking?
The World Bank’s World Development Indicators put the population of the West Bank and Gaza at 5,289,152 for 2024, a projection off the 2017 census rather than a count. The same series records fertility in the territory at 6.81 births per woman in 1990, the starting point of a long decline.
The Palestinian authority’s own fertility figures, as reported in the arXiv preprint by Sumour, El-Astal, Shabat and Radwan (2007), run 6.77 in 1992, 6.06 in 1994 and 5.93 in 1999, with an official projection near 3.06 for 2025. Those inputs are cited from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics rather than measured by the paper’s authors, and the 2025 value is a projection.
Khawaja, writing in Population Studies (2000), found the fertility transition well underway in the West Bank since about 1985 with a lull during the first Intifada, and no clear sign of a transition in the Gaza Strip at that point, attributing the measured rise he examined chiefly to changes in marital structure and to higher marital fertility among younger women. Fargues, in Population and Development Review (2000), read Israeli and Palestinian fertility across the twentieth century as tracking national conflict and pronatal sentiment rather than a smooth modernization curve.
The United Nations Population Division publishes the territory as State of Palestine in its World Population Prospects 2024 revision, and the UNFPA dashboard reports about 5.6 million including East Jerusalem, sourced to that revision. That is a model projection on a different scope from the World Bank series, so the two are not interchangeable and are not compared here; the disputed population counts are their own subject.
Forward-looking, the record shows a growing enumerated population with a falling birth rate, and one territory, Gaza, where the Palestinian authority’s own end-2025 accounting records a net decline for the first time in the series.
Where does the evidence for ancestral descent run thin?
The enumerated record for the West Bank and Gaza begins with the 1997 census of 2,895,683 residents, the first of three rounds conducted by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, an authority itself established after the Oslo Accords. Nothing in that record measures descent from the land’s ancient inhabitants.
The limits are stated by the publishing bodies. The World Bank notes that Palestinian values before 1997 are modelled and that totals after 2017 are projections off the census rather than counts. The United Nations Population Division reconstructs 1950 to 2023 from censuses, civil registration and surveys, and projects thereafter. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counts residents of Israel from the state’s establishment forward. The peer-reviewed demographic literature cited above, Al-Qudsi (2000), Khawaja (2000), Fargues (2000), measures fertility, marriage, education and labour-market outcomes in the twentieth century. None of these measures ancestry, and none claims to.
The material that does assert descent from antiquity sits outside the evidence tiers used here, and it circulates on both sides of the question. A Times of Israel blog post titled “How ‘Palestinians’ Arrived in Palestine” argues for recent arrival; a 2025 commentary from the Israel Institute of New Zealand, “Inventing Palestine: How a Modern National Identity Emerged by Erasing Jewish History,” argues that the identity is a modern construction; a fact sheet from Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, “Demographics of Historic Palestine prior to 1948,” argues for long-standing local majority. Each is commentary from an organisation or an author with a stated position, not a refereed measurement, and none is relied on for a figure in this report. Unrefereed papers deposited on open repositories carry the ancestry framing in both directions as well.
So the absence is specific and worth stating plainly. Genetic and genealogical continuity from named ancient inhabitants to named present-day families is not measured in the census records, the national statistical series or the peer-reviewed demography that answer the rest of this question. The habitation of the region is documented; the enumerated populations are counted; the descent claim, in this record, is asserted rather than measured.
Methodology and limitations
This report draws on four source types, labelled at each use. First, official and primary records: the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics 2017 census and its end-2025 status brief, Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics media releases and compilations, the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel as published in Official Gazette Number 1 on 14 May 1948, and United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3236 of 22 November 1974. Second, compiled international statistical series treated as official records: the World Bank’s World Development Indicators and the United Nations Population Division’s World Population Prospects 2024. Third, peer-reviewed research: Al-Qudsi (2000), Khawaja (2000) and Fargues (2000), plus the Edinburgh University Press study of the region’s designation. Fourth, scholarly books from university and trade presses: Morris (2004) and Pappé (2006). One preprint is used and labelled, Sumour and colleagues (2007), and the figures taken from it are Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics values it reports rather than measurements of its own. Hababeh and colleagues (2018) is a conference abstract in a journal supplement, so its reported detail is limited.
Figures published by a party to the events are attributed as that party’s own count throughout: the Palestinian bureau’s counts for the West Bank and Gaza, and Israel’s bureau’s counts for Israel. Neither is independently verified here.
Three arithmetic constraints in the underlying sources are carried rather than smoothed. The Palestinian bureau’s 10.6% decline for Gaza belongs to a base implied by the 254,000 absolute change, roughly 2.384 million, and not to the 2.2 million pre-war residents the same brief reports; the two are stated separately for that reason. Israel’s published shares of 78.5% and 21.5% are shares of the 9.888 million its two named population groups sum to, not of the 10.148 million total that also includes about 260,000 foreign residents, so counts are given rather than those percentages. Post-2017 totals for the West Bank and Gaza are projections off the census in both the World Bank and United Nations series, and the two series are not mixed.
Two limitations bear on the question directly. The 2017 census could not directly enumerate East Jerusalem and used administrative estimates there, while Israel’s bureau counts East Jerusalem residents inside Israel’s total, so the two series overlap on a population neither reports separately in the figures used here. And the characterisation of the 1948 displacement is an open disagreement between named historians, Morris and Pappé, working from overlapping archives; both are reported, and no figure in this report depends on resolving it.
Conclusion
Continuous means two things in the question, and the records answer them at two different depths. People have lived in this land without interruption, and they are counted today: 4,780,978 enumerated in the West Bank and Gaza in the 2017 census, 2.130 million Arab residents counted by Israel in September 2025, 1.707 million Moslem residents at the end of 2021, about 184,200 Christians in December 2025, approximately 152,000 Druze in February 2024. A community named Palestinian entered international instruments in 1974, a congress in 1897 and a declaration in 1948 date the institutional beginnings of the other national movement in the land, and the region has carried the name Palestine in histories, inscriptions, maps and coins since classical antiquity. What no census, no national statistical series and no peer-reviewed demography in this record measures is descent from the land’s ancient inhabitants.
Continuity of presence and continuity of residence also part company, and the dates where they part are documented. Roughly 700,000 people left their homes in 1948 on Morris’s archival estimate. Nearly two million of Gaza’s roughly 2.2 million pre-war residents were displaced inside the Strip on the Palestinian bureau’s own count, with roughly 100,000 having left it and a net decline of about 254,000 recorded for the end of 2025. Fertility in the territory fell from 6.81 births per woman in 1990 toward an official projection near 3.06 for 2025. The people counted are still there; a large share of them are not where their grandparents were counted.
Which leaves the part of this question that no statistical office answers. The strongest version of the claim, unbroken descent from antiquity, is asserted in commentary and unmeasured in the record; the strongest version of its denial, a population that arrived recently, is contradicted by every enumeration and every historical survey named above. Arguments about who belongs in a land run on exactly that gap between what is documented and what is claimed, and the same gap is where the language about invented peoples and fabricated nations does its work. Is a contested date for a national identity, once it travels from a journal into an argument about whether a population exists, one of the inputs this Institute exists to find?
Frequently Asked Questions
Which authority counts residents of East Jerusalem?
Both do, differently. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics could not directly enumerate East Jerusalem in its 2017 census and used administrative estimates there, while Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counts Jerusalem, including the neighbourhoods annexed after 1967, as a single municipal population: 60.5% Jews and others and 39.5% Arabs at the end of 2023, on its own preliminary figures.
Why do Israel’s published population shares not sum to its total?
Because the bureau’s two named population groups do not exhaust the total it publishes. In September 2025 it recorded about 10.148 million residents, of whom 7.758 million were Jews and others and 2.130 million Arabs, summing to 9.888 million; the remaining roughly 260,000 are foreign residents, counted in the total since 2023 but outside those two groups.
How does Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics define Arabs in its counts?
The bureau defines Arabs as Moslems, Arab Christians and Druze, and Others as non-Arab Christians, other religions and persons registered as not classified by religion, as set out in its Independence Day releases. Its Christian releases then split that population further, recording 78.7% of Christians in Israel as Arab Christians at the end of 2024.
How do current fertility rates compare inside Israel?
Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics recorded a total fertility rate of 2.89 children per woman for 2022 in its Israel in Figures compilation, and its vital-statistics series by population group shows the Jewish and Muslim rates having converged to within about a tenth of a child. Christian and Druze rates in the same series sit below replacement, the Druze rate at 1.85 for 2022.
Why do post-2017 totals for the West Bank and Gaza differ between series?
Because both are projections from the same census on different assumptions and scopes. The World Bank’s World Development Indicators give 5,289,152 for 2024, while the UNFPA dashboard reports about 5.6 million including East Jerusalem, sourced to the United Nations Population Division’s 2024 revision. Pick one series, name it, and stay within it.
What does Israel’s Nation-State Law say about self-determination?
Clause 1(c) of Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, adopted in 2018, states in the Knesset’s published English translation, which the Knesset labels unofficial, that “the realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People.” Israel’s Supreme Court dismissed fifteen petitions against the law and upheld it in HCJ 5555/18, delivered 8 July 2021.
Sources
- Al-Qudsi, S. S., 2000. Profiles of Refugee and Non-Refugee Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza. International Migration, 38(4), 79 to 107. DOI 10.1111/1468-2435.00121. Peer-reviewed.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, no date. Palestine and the Palestinians, 1948 to 1967. britannica.com. Reference work.
- Fargues, P., 2000. Protracted National Conflict and Fertility Change: Palestinians and Israelis in the Twentieth Century. Population and Development Review, 26(3), 441 to 482. DOI 10.1111/j.1728-4457.2000.00441.x. Peer-reviewed.
- Hababeh, M., Zeidan, W., Abu El-Kader, M., Abu Thaher, A., Kassim, N., Habash, E., and colleagues, 2018. Contraceptive use by Palestine refugee mothers of young children attending UNRWA clinics. The Lancet, 391(Supplement 2), S26. DOI 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)30392-1. Conference abstract in a peer-reviewed supplement.
- Holy Land Studies, 2016. The Conception of Palestine from the Late Bronze Age to the Modern Era. Edinburgh University Press. DOI 10.3366/hlps.2016.0140. Peer-reviewed.
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2022. The Moslem Population in Israel: Data on the Occasion of Eid al-Adha. Media Release 217/2022. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2024. Israel in Figures 2023: Selected Data From the Statistical Abstract of Israel. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2024. Selected Data on the Occasion of Jerusalem Day, 2024. Media Release 165/2024. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2024. The Druze Population of Israel, On the Occasion of the Nabi Shu’ayb Festival 2024. Media Release 124/2024. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. Christmas 2025: Christians in Israel. Media Release 413/2025. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. Population of Israel on the Eve of Rosh Hashana 5786. Media release, September 2025. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Israel Institute of New Zealand, 2025. Inventing Palestine: How a Modern National Identity Emerged by Erasing Jewish History. israelinstitute.nz. Advocacy commentary.
- Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, no date. Demographics of Historic Palestine prior to 1948. Fact sheet 007, cjpme.org. Advocacy organization.
- Khawaja, M., 2000. The recent rise in Palestinian fertility: permanent or transient? Population Studies, 54(3), 331 to 346. DOI 10.1080/713779091. Peer-reviewed.
- Knesset, 2018. Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. Official English translation, main.knesset.gov.il. Official record (enacted legislation).
- Morris, B., 2004. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521009676. Scholarly book.
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2018. Population, Housing and Establishments Census 2017: Final Results. Ramallah. pcbs.gov.ps. Official record.
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. A Brief on the Status of the Palestinian People at the End of 2025. pcbs.gov.ps. Official record.
- Pappé, I., 2006. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld Publications. Scholarly book.
- Provisional Government of Israel, 1948. Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. Official Gazette Number 1, 14 May 1948; Knesset English text, main.knesset.gov.il. Official record (founding instrument).
- Sumour, M. A., El-Astal, A. H., Shabat, M. M., Radwan, M. A., 2007. Simulation of Demographic Change in Palestinian Territories. arXiv:0705.4427. Preprint.
- Supreme Court of Israel, 2021. HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset, judgment of 8 July 2021. versa.cardozo.yu.edu. Official record (court judgment).
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- United Nations General Assembly, 1974. Resolution 3236 (XXIX), adopted 22 November 1974. Official record (recorded resolution).
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