Palestinians

The Palestinian people (Arabic: الشعب الفلسطيني‎, ash-sha‘b al-Filasṭīnī), also referred to as Palestinians (Arabic: الفلسطينيون‎, al-Filasṭīniyyūn, Hebrew: פָלַסְטִינִים), are an ethnic group comprising the modern descendants of the peoples who have lived in Palestine over the centuries, and who today are largely culturally and linguistically Arab due to Arabization of the region. Despite various wars and exoduses (such as that in 1948), roughly one half of the world's Palestinian population continues to reside in historic Palestine, the area encompassing the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Israel. In this combined area, as of 2004, Palestinians constituted 49% of all inhabitants, encompassing the entire population of the Gaza Strip (1.6 million), the majority of the population of the West Bank (approximately 2.3 million versus close to 500,000 Jewish Israeli citizens which includes about 200,000 in East Jerusalem), and 16.5% of the population of Israel proper as Arab citizens of Israel. Many are Palestinian refugees or internally displaced Palestinians, including more than a million in the Gaza Strip, three-quarters of a million in the West Bank, and about a quarter of a million in Israel proper. Of the Palestinian population who live abroad, known as the Palestinian diaspora, more than half are stateless lacking citizenship in any country. 3.24 million of the diaspora population live in neighboring Jordan, 1.5 million live between Syria and Lebanon, a quarter of a million in Saudi Arabia, with Chile's half a million representing the largest concentration outside the Arab world.