The histories

The briefs and the war map carry the present tense. This page carries how each side got here: what is documented, what a court or a UN body ruled and when, and where the numbers come from. Every entry names its source, so any part of it can be checked and disagreed with on the evidence.

A place with people already on it

Palestine spent four centuries under Ottoman rule as an Arab land of farming villages, port towns and olive and citrus groves, with a mostly Muslim and Christian population and a small indigenous Jewish community. In the 1880s, waves of pogroms in the Russian empire turned political Zionism into an organized project: Jewish immigration began, land was bought through European-backed funds, and the peasant tenants on that land were frequently removed once it changed hands. By 1914 the immigrant community was a fact on the ground rather than a plan on paper.

In 1917 Britain promised a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, while stating that nothing should prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities. Both halves of that sentence were quoted by every side afterwards as a promise to itself. Britain took the mandate in 1920 and spent the next three decades managing the contradiction with immigration quotas, land rules and troops, until the mandate broke under the weight of the Holocaust and the revolt against it.

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica, Balfour Declaration

Partition, war, and the Nakba

The Arab revolt of 1936 to 1939 shook the mandate, and Britain answered by limiting Jewish immigration on the eve of the Holocaust, a policy the Zionist leadership treated as a betrayal. After the war, survivors in displaced persons camps and clandestine ship arrivals made Palestine ungovernable. In November 1947 the General Assembly voted to split the country into a Jewish and an Arab state, resolution 181, allotting the proposed Jewish state about 55 per cent of the land while Jews were roughly a third of the population. The Arab leadership and the surrounding states rejected the plan and fighting started immediately.

Israel declared independence in May 1948 and the neighboring armies entered. The war ended with Israel holding far more territory than partition had offered: about 78 per cent of mandatory Palestine, with Gaza under Egyptian military rule and the West Bank under Jordan. The Palestinian side calls that year the Nakba, the catastrophe: around 700,000 people expelled or fled, hundreds of villages emptied and many of them demolished, and no right of return granted. Their descendants now number in the millions. Resolution 194 of December 1948 says those who wish to live in peace with their neighbors should be allowed to return to their homes, and it has never been implemented.

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica, United Nations Resolution 181 · Encyclopedia Britannica, 1948 Arab-Israeli War · United Nations, Right of return of the Palestinian people

The occupation starts

In June 1967 Israel fought Egypt, Jordan and Syria and in six days took the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. The Security Council answered within months with resolution 242, which put two rules in writing: territory cannot be acquired by war, and a just peace must include withdrawal. The resolution was drafted with a deliberate ambiguity about how much withdrawal, and every peace framework since has argued over that gap.

The military government that went into the West Bank and Gaza was described as temporary. What it built is still running: permits, land confiscation, demolition orders and settlements. The first settlements went up within a year of the war, and the Fourth Geneva Convention, which an occupying power is bound by and which bars that power from moving its own population into the territory it occupies, has been the legal reference point ever since. Israel argues the convention does not apply to these territories. Every other body that has ruled on it has disagreed.

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica, Six-Day War · United Nations, Security Council Resolution 242 (1967)

Settlers, courts, and the word apartheid

Settlements grew from a security argument into a fact on the ground. The Secretary-General's report of September 2025 counts 737,332 settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, across 141 settlements in the West Bank and 25 in East Jerusalem. The International Court of Justice has ruled twice: in 2004 that the separation wall and the settlements it serves are unlawful, and in July 2024 that Israel's continued presence in the territory is unlawful, that it must end that presence as rapidly as possible, stop all new settlement activity, evacuate the settlers and pay reparations.

The word apartheid arrived through investigation rather than rhetoric. B'Tselem, Israel's own human rights organization, reached that conclusion in January 2021; Human Rights Watch in April 2021; Amnesty International in February 2022; and a United Nations special rapporteur in 2022. Each of them applied the legal definition from the 1973 convention and the Rome Statute to the same record of laws and practices, and each described a single regime between the river and the sea with different rights for two peoples under it. That four independent bodies, including one inside Israel, reached the same word is the part worth arguing from.

Source: United Nations, Secretary-General report on settlements (September 2025) · International Court of Justice, Advisory Opinion press release (July 2024) · B'Tselem, This is apartheid (2021) · Human Rights Watch, A Threshold Crossed (2021) · Amnesty International, Israel's apartheid against Palestinians (2022) · United Nations, Special Rapporteur on Palestine (2022)

Oslo, and what replaced it

Oslo I in 1993 brought mutual recognition: Israel recognized the PLO, the PLO recognized Israel, and a Palestinian Authority was created to govern parts of the West Bank and Gaza while the hard questions were pushed to final status talks: Jerusalem, refugees, borders, settlements, security. The territory was sorted into areas A, B and C, and area C, roughly 60 per cent of the West Bank, stayed under full Israeli control. Rabin signed the agreement and was assassinated in November 1995 by an Israeli extremist opposed to it.

The final status talks collapsed at Camp David in 2000 and the second intifada followed, with suicide bombings inside Israel and a reoccupation of West Bank cities by the army. Hamas won the Palestinian legislative election in 2006, and the Fatah and Hamas split of 2007 left Gaza under Hamas and the West Bank under the Authority. Settlement construction ran through every one of those years. Oslo did not fail in a single moment, it was emptied out over a decade while the map changed underneath it.

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica, Oslo Accords · Encyclopedia Britannica, Hamas

Gaza, walled and bombed

Israel pulled its settlers and soldiers out of Gaza in 2005 and two years later, after Hamas won the election and took the strip, imposed a land and sea blockade, with Egypt controlling the southern crossing at Rafah. The result was described by the UN and every aid agency as a lock on the population: a few hours of electricity a day, water and sewage systems failing, and unemployment among the highest anywhere. Movement in and out shrank to permits for medical and humanitarian cases.

The blockade was enforced by repeated wars: December 2008, November 2012, July 2014, May 2021, each killing thousands of Palestinians and hundreds of Israelis and flattening sections of Gaza that were then rebuilt. In 2018 Palestinians marched to the fence in what they called the Great March of Return. A UN commission investigated every killing at the protest sites and found that 183 of 189 Palestinians killed were shot with live ammunition, that only in one case was there an imminent threat, and that the rest of the shootings were unlawful under international law.

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica, Gaza Strip: Blockade · United Nations, Commission of inquiry on the 2018 Gaza protests

Genocide, on the record

On 7 October 2023 Hamas and other armed groups broke out of Gaza, killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel and took roughly 250 hostages. Attacking civilians and taking hostages are war crimes, and the killings and the sexual violence documented that day were condemned clearly and should be. So should the demand that the hostages be freed. None of it explains what was then done to 2.3 million people.

This page uses the word genocide because the United Nations' own investigators reached it. On 16 September 2025 the Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded, on reasonable grounds, that Israeli authorities and security forces have committed and are continuing to commit genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to destroy it in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births. It found the intent behind those acts and placed responsibility on the State of Israel for failing to prevent the genocide, for committing it and for failing to punish it. Amnesty International reports the same genocide continuing through 2026, including after the October 2025 ceasefire; Human Rights Watch records Israel's acts of genocide and crimes against humanity persisting through that ceasefire; and the International Court of Justice, where South Africa brought the case, ordered provisional measures in January, March and May 2024, with the case still being briefed today. The International Criminal Court has held arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity since November 2024. None of that paperwork has stopped a single strike.

The counts are specific and they are still climbing. Gaza's health ministry puts the dead at 74,469 and the wounded at 175,492 since 7 October 2023 (Al Jazeera, 17 October 2026); Human Rights Watch puts the toll at over 74,000, including over 21,000 children. Children are about 30 per cent of everyone killed: the UN commission counted at least 20,179 children dead and 44,143 wounded between 7 October 2023 and 7 October 2025 alone. The ministry total does not separate fighters from civilians, and UN Human Rights notes that even its verified counts leave out the civilian men killed, so the civilian share of the dead is higher than any published split admits. The ceasefire announced on 10 October 2025 did not stop the killing: 1,511 more Palestinians have been killed since, more than 340 of them children in the first year (UNICEF), and the drones kept working Gaza City's streets. More than a million people were pushed off their land, about 800,000 children are still in tents or broken buildings, Israeli forces now control or restrict access to roughly 65 per cent of the strip, and a year into the ceasefire aid remains far below what is required with the routes repeatedly blocked.

Gaza is rubble, and the satellite counts say so plainly: about 82 per cent of the strip's roughly 200,000 buildings are damaged, two thirds of them destroyed, and the destruction has climbed nearly 10 per cent since the ceasefire was signed (UNRWA and the UN satellite centre, August 2026). That is some 60 million tonnes of debris, enough to fill nearly 3,000 container ships, and the UN puts at least seven years on clearing it. The war did not damage whole cities, it erased them.

Donald Trump's answer to that is a resort city. His son-in-law Jared Kushner carried a $30bn 'New Gaza' blueprint of glittering towers, AI-generated skyscrapers and seaside resorts to Davos in January 2026, presented through the Board of Peace that Trump set up under Security Council resolution 2803, and a UN official who reviewed it said plainly that it would be 'built on the graveyards of countless unidentified Palestinians'. Not one Palestinian was in the room when Trump, Kushner, Tony Blair and Israeli envoys shaped the future of a place they do not live in; the leaked outline would put Gaza under a US trusteeship for about a decade, empty it of its population, and market the coast as the 'Riviera of the Middle East'. The plan circulating the White House is formally named GREAT, Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration, and Transformation. Demolitions to clear the way had already started in Rafah, over houses whose owners never agreed, transforming forced displacement into a development opportunity, as one of those owners told The Independent.

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica, October 7 attack · United Nations, commission of inquiry: genocide in Gaza (September 2025) · Amnesty International, Israel's genocide continues (September 2026) · Human Rights Watch, one year after the Gaza ceasefire (October 2026) · Al Jazeera, death toll since October 2023 (17 October 2026) · United Nations, one year after the ceasefire, killings continue (October 2026) · UN News, destruction rises nearly 10 per cent since ceasefire (August 2026) · The Independent, Trump's New Gaza is built on the graveyards of Palestinians · The New Arab, the Gaza Riviera plan (September 2025) · International Criminal Court, arrest warrants (November 2024)

The methods: homes, pagers, snipers

The methods are documented by the people who ran them. In April 2024 +972 Magazine and Local Call published the account of six Israeli intelligence officers: an AI system called Lavender marked as many as 37,000 Palestinians, and their family homes, as strike targets in the war's first weeks, while human reviewers served as what one officer called a rubber stamp, about twenty seconds per target, knowing the machine is wrong roughly ten per cent of the time. A second system did exactly what its name says. Where's Daddy? tracked the marked men and raised the alert the moment they walked into their family's residences, at night, with everyone inside. The officer's description of the doctrine needs no translation: the army 'bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option', 'it's much easier to bomb a family's home', and the arithmetic came out, in his words, as 'most of the people you killed were women and children'.

On 17 September 2024 Israel turned a supply chain into a weapon. Thousands of pagers bought by Hezbollah had been rigged with explosives as small as an eraser, through shell companies inserted into the supply chain, then detonated at once across Lebanon and parts of Syria, killing 12 people, two of them children, and wounding more than 3,000 in a single afternoon, in homes, offices and shops. Israel boasts of it as a show of its technological and intelligence prowess, and the survivors are still rebuilding their hands and their faces.

The children were not collateral. The UN commission's June 2026 report states the method plainly: Israel has targeted Palestinian children 'directly by shooting at their vital organs using precision weapons such as quadcopters and snipers', alongside wide-area strikes on the buildings, schools and displacement camps crowded with them, and it treats the deliberate targeting of children as a key element of the genocidal intent it found. The cases are forensic. The 401st Brigade shot the car carrying Hind Rajab and her family, children among them, in January 2024, then shelled the Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance that came for them and killed its two paramedics. A 98th Division sniper shot a 15-year-old boy holding a white flag in Khan Younis, then his 20-year-old brother when he ran to help. A quadcopter unit shot a 10-day-old baby boy. Between 7 October 2023 and 7 October 2025 more than 20,000 children were killed and 44,000 wounded in Gaza, about 30 per cent of everyone killed, and in the West Bank at least 213 children were killed by Israeli security forces to 20 October 2025.

Source: +972 Magazine, Lavender: the AI machine directing Israel's bombing spree (2024) · Associated Press, survivors of the pager attack (2025) · United Nations, commission of inquiry report on children (June 2026) · United Nations, genocide through the targeting of children (June 2026) · OHCHR, children's report findings (June 2026)

Settlers with the army behind them

The settlers are not a freelance problem, they are policy. Human Rights Watch put it in the title of its August 2026 report: West Bank: Israel-backed settler violence drives displacement. Under it sits the finding: Israeli authorities are arming, funding and granting impunity to the attackers, armed settlers operate alongside army units or with soldiers standing by while Palestinians are shot and expelled from their land, and the state 'provides the weapons, the legal cover, and the budget to do it' in the words of its researcher. Violence spiked in March and April 2026 with killings, including of children, assaults and sexual violence. 107 communities have been fully or partly displaced since January 2023, and in the first four months of 2026 alone more Palestinians were displaced by settler attacks, demolitions and evictions than in all of 2025.

The numbers are kept by the UN and they are records, not estimates. OCHA documented more than 1,000 settler attacks that caused casualties or property damage between January and mid-June 2026, across more than 230 communities, about six a day, with over 2,200 Palestinians displaced behind them; Human Rights Watch counts an average of 6.6 attacks a day, the highest year on OCHA's record. At least 15 Palestinians, including two children, had been killed by settlers by 24 July 2026, on track to pass the previous record of 16 set in 2023. The army still does the larger share of the killing: Israeli forces have killed 969 Palestinians in the West Bank since 7 October 2023, a count running to 7 October 2025, 182 of them in 2025 alone, and 57 already killed in 2026 by mid-June, 13 of them children and two women. One of the 2026 dead was a seven-month-old baby in Hebron, shot when Israeli forces opened fire on the car her parents were driving.

Accountability is the part that never arrives. Israeli authorities continue to rarely prosecute anyone for violence against Palestinians, and the UN Secretary-General told the Security Council in June 2026 about 'a presumption of impunity' and displacement in the West Bank at levels not seen since 1967. The UN's children's report counted at least 213 children killed by Israeli security forces in the West Bank between 7 October 2023 and 20 October 2025, at least two boys killed by settlers, and over 1,665 children detained since 7 October 2023. In the first nine months of 2025 Israeli settlers killed seven Palestinians, among them Odeh Hathalin, who worked on the Oscar-winning film 'No Other Land'.

Source: Human Rights Watch, Israel-backed settler violence drives displacement (August 2026) · United Nations, OCHA situation report (June 2026) · Human Rights Watch, World Report 2026: Israel and Palestine · OHCHR, children's report findings (June 2026) · United Nations OCHA, data on casualties

How the system was built

Vladimir Putin was appointed prime minister in August 1999. Three weeks later apartment buildings were blown up in Moscow and other cities, killing hundreds, and the war against Chechnya that followed became the vehicle for his rise. Grozny was reduced to rubble over the winter, the conflict was sold on television as a counterterrorism operation, and he won the presidency in March 2000 with the main channels already brought to heel.

The next four years set the pattern that everything after it followed: independent television taken over (NTV seized in 2001), the oligarchs exiled or jailed, most notably Khodorkovsky arrested in 2003, regional governors stripped of independence, and the press narrowed to a managed consensus. In 2008 he swapped jobs with Medvedev to keep the office in 2012. By the time he looked abroad, the domestic checks had already been removed, and war had already been proven to work as politics.

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica, Vladimir Putin · BBC, Chechnya timeline

Warnings, then Crimea

At the Munich security conference in 2007 Putin attacked the post Cold War order as a one man game run by Washington. In August 2008 Russian forces fought Georgia and stopped short of Tbilisi, leaving South Ossetia and Abkhazia under Russian control and formally recognized, a template for what came later: seize, recognize, hold. At home the 2011 and 2012 election protests were answered with new repression laws.

In February 2014 Ukraine's president fled after months of protest and Russian troops without insignia took Crimea within days. The March referendum was rejected by the UN General Assembly on 27 March 2014, 100 votes to 11 with 58 abstentions, which affirmed Ukraine's borders and called the vote invalid. Fighting then began in the Donbas with Russian weapons, money and fighters, and on 17 July 2014 Malaysia Airlines flight 17 was shot down over the region killing all 298 people aboard; investigators traced the launcher to a Russian brigade.

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica, South Ossetia · United Nations, General Assembly resolution on Crimea (2014) · Encyclopedia Britannica, Malaysia Airlines flight 17 · Encyclopedia Britannica, Russia-Ukraine War

The long middle war

The Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 froze the Donbas fighting without settling it, and the war there ground on for eight years with thousands killed. Around the same period the toolkit widened far beyond Ukraine: interference in western elections assessed by intelligence services, the NotPetya malware attack of 2017 that damaged hospitals and shipping worldwide, the nerve agent poisoning of Sergei Skripal in England in 2018, and the Wagner mercenary group fighting in Syria, Libya and the Sahel while laundering Moscow's deniability.

The sharpest warning came at home. Alexei Navalny survived poisoning with a Novichok nerve agent in August 2020, filmed the men who had tailed him including an FSB agent who confessed to the plot, flew back to Moscow in January 2021 and was arrested on landing. Navalny was then imprisoned for years on charges most observers treated as invented, and he died in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024. A state that does that to its own opposition was not going to treat a neighbor's sovereignty more gently.

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica, Russia-Ukraine War · Encyclopedia Britannica, Alexei Navalny · Encyclopedia Britannica, Wagner Group

The full-scale invasion

Hours before dawn on 24 February 2022 Putin announced a special military operation, having recognized the Russian-held parts of the Donbas the night before. The stated goals were demilitarization and denazification, a government in Kyiv led by people he called drug addicts and neo Nazis, and the column of armor driving on the capital made the real plan plain: remove the government in a few days. It failed, and the war that followed is the largest in Europe since 1945.

The world's response was immediate. On 2 March 2022 the General Assembly, meeting in an emergency session, demanded Russia's complete and unconditional withdrawal from Ukraine's internationally recognized territory, with 141 states voting in favor. Russia responded with the annexation of four Ukrainian regions in September 2022 after referendums held under occupation and widely condemned, with a partial mobilization that sent hundreds of thousands of Russians out of the country, and with repeated threats to use nuclear weapons.

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica, Russia-Ukraine War · United Nations, resolution A/RES/ES-11/1 on the aggression against Ukraine

Atrocities documented, warrants issued

United Nations monitors were on the ground from the first weeks. They documented the killing of civilians, torture and executions, forced deportations, sexual violence and the systematic strikes on Ukraine's power and water system, and they keep publishing a monthly count that both sides are held to. The killings of civilians in Bucha, Irpin and Hostomel after Russian forces withdrew from the Kyiv region in April 2022 were documented by UN investigators and became the clearest early evidence of the war's character.

The courts followed. On 17 March 2023 the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin and for Maria Lvova-Belova over the unlawful deportation and transfer of children from Ukraine to Russia, the first warrant for a sitting head of state in the court's history. Russia does not recognize the ICC and no member state has handed him over, which is why the warrant's real effect is on travel and on the record. Warrants for strikes on civilian targets have followed from other jurisdictions.

Source: United Nations, monitoring mission reports on protection of civilians in Ukraine · International Criminal Court, arrest warrants for Putin and Lvova-Belova (March 2023)

Inside Russia

The domestic crackdown started within days of the invasion. Legislation criminalizing what the state called fakes about the army carried up to fifteen years, discrediting the military became an administrative offense, and the independent outlets that were left closed or fled abroad. Novaya Gazeta suspended publication, TV Rain went into exile, and foreign agent and extremist labels were applied to organizations down to local human rights groups.

OVD-Info, which counts political arrests in Russia, recorded mass detentions in the first weeks of the war and has since documented criminal cases, dismissals and intimidation continuing for years. The one attempt at organized force from inside the system came from Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose Wagner columns marched on Moscow in June 2023 before turning back under a deal; he died in a plane crash two months later. Nobody was left inside Russia able to say no to the war in public.

Source: OVD-Info, three years of the anti-war movement · Encyclopedia Britannica, Alexei Navalny · Encyclopedia Britannica, Yevgeny Prigozhin

What is documented, and where to watch

The territorial question is not settled and this page will not pretend otherwise: several Ukrainian regions remain under Russian occupation or fighting, and the diplomatic picture changes faster than a reference page can honestly follow. What does not change is the record above: the invasion was launched without a Security Council mandate and in violation of the UN Charter, the General Assembly has demanded withdrawal repeatedly, and the evidence of war crimes is being collected by bodies that publish their findings for anyone to check.

For the present tense, use this site's War Map, which draws the front line from DeepStateMap's public snapshot with a delay of up to two to three days and a warning against using it to plan movement, plus the twice daily briefs for strikes, diplomacy and energy politics. History is settled by documents. A war is settled by what happens next.

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica, Russia-Ukraine War · This site, the War Map