JERUSALEM: The Palestinians are preparing to submit a formal request to become the 194th member of the United Nations when the General Assembly begins its meetings on September 20, despite US and Israeli opposition.
The following is a factfile on the Palestinian territories:
GEOGRAPHY: The West Bank and the Gaza Strip cover a combined total area of about 6,020 square kilometres (2,410 square miles).
The West Bank (5,655 square kilometres) lies between Israel to the west and Jordan to the east.
The Gaza Strip (365 square kilometres), is tucked between the Mediterranean Sea to the west, southwestern Israel, and Egypt immediately to the south.
POPULATION: About 4.2 million, according to a Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics estimate for 2011, with some 2.6 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and 1.6 million in the Gaza Strip, one of the world's most densely populated areas.
According to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), there are another 2.95 million Palestinian refugees scattered around the Arab world, with two million in Jordan, 455,000 in Lebanon and 496,000 in Syria.
According to settlement watchdog Peace Now, around 270,000 Jewish settlers live in the West Bank, and 190,000 in east Jerusalem. Israel evacuated around 8,000 settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005.
CAPITAL: The Palestinian Authority is based in the West Bank town of Ramallah. Gaza City is the main administrative centre in the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians have always claimed Jerusalem as the capital of their promised, future state.
LANGUAGE: Arabic
MAIN CITIES:
West Bank: Bethlehem, east Jerusalem, Hebron, Jenin, Jericho, Nablus, Ramallah Gaza Strip: Gaza City, Khan Yunis, Rafah RELIGION: The vast majority of Palestinians -- 97 percent -- are Muslims, but Christians form a strong minority.
HISTORY: Palestine, once a territory governed by the Ottoman Empire, came under British mandate with the approval of the League of Nations in 1922. Increasing violence between Jewish and Arab populations led Britain to turn the issue over to the United Nations in 1947.
The United Nations proposed partitioning Palestine into two independent states -- one Palestinian Arab and the other Jewish.
Israel proclaimed its independence in 1948, occupying 77 percent of the territory of Palestine. More than half the Palestinian population fled or were expelled.
In the 1967 Middle East war, Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip. East Jerusalem was subsequently annexed by the Jewish state but the move was never recognised by the international community. Israel withdrew all ground troops and settlers from Gaza last September.
POLITICS: Following the signing of the Oslo autonomy accords in 1993, Yasser Arafat returned from a decade in exile in Tunisia to establish the Palestinian Authority, which was to oversee the road to statehood.
Now, the Palestinian Authority exercises jurisdiction in only parts of the occupied West Bank as well as the Gaza Strip.
Arafat died in November 2004 and Mahmud Abbas was elected his successor as president of the Palestinian Authority in January 2005.
The Palestinian parliament, which has been enlarged from 88 to 132 seats, had been dominated by the Fatah movement founded by Arafat in 1959. Palestinian legislative elections were held for the first time in January 1996.
In 2006 Hamas scored a landslide win in the general election, ending 10 years of Fatah domination.
ECONOMY: The Palestinian economy took a downturn after the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, in September 2000. It is largely dependent on foreign aid.
It was further complicated by the imposition of a strict Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip in 2006 following the capture by Gaza-based militants of an Israeli soldier.
In 2007 the militant Islamist Hamas took control of the coastal strip, further distancing it from the West Bank administration of Mahmud Abbas. The economies of the two territories have been diverging as a result.
A World Bank report prepared for a September 18, international donors' meeting estimated unemployment in the first half of 2011 at 15 percent in the West Bank and 25.6 percent in Gaza.
It downgraded a previous forecast of nine percent Palestinian real GDP growth for the year to seven percent.
A 2009 UN analysis estimated that 39 percent of Palestinians lived below the poverty line of $3.1 dollars (2.27 euros) a day, with 27.6 percent in "deep poverty" on per capita incomes of $2.5 (1.83 euros) or less.