The State of Palestine is a political concept and a declared sovereign entity, not a fully realized state in the traditional sense, that claims the territories of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip. It was formally declared by the Palestine National Council (PNC), the legislative body of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), on November 15, 1988, in Algiers. The declaration was a move to establish an independent state for the Palestinian people and implicitly accepted the principle of a two-state solution based on the 1947 UN Partition Plan.
The mechanism of its governance involves the Palestinian Authority (PA), an interim self-governing body created by the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995, which administers parts of the West Bank and Gaza. While Jerusalem is the proclaimed capital, Ramallah serves as the de facto administrative center. The State of Palestine is recognized by 157 of the 193 UN member states (as of September 2025).
A key connection is its status at the United Nations (UN), which was upgraded to a permanent non-member observer state in November 2012 by UN General Assembly Resolution 67/19. This status allows it to participate in UN proceedings and join international bodies, such as acceding to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2015. Recently, in May 2024, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution recognizing that Palestine met the requirements for full UN membership, though a Security Council vote for full membership was vetoed by the US in April 2024. Despite the international recognition, the state remains under Israeli occupation, and its full sovereignty is not universally acknowledged.