Oslo and its unravelling
In September 1993, on the White House lawn, Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands over the Oslo Accords: a framework, negotiated in secret in Norway, under which the PLO recognised Israel's right to exist and renounced violence, and Israel recognised the PLO as representing the Palestinian people and agreed to a phased transfer of limited self-rule to a new Palestinian Authority (PA). It was the first direct, mutual recognition between the two sides.
Oslo in practice
What followed fell well short of that promise. The Accords divided the West Bank into Areas A, B and C (full Palestinian civil and security control, mixed control, and full Israeli control respectively), with Area C, containing most settlements and the land connecting them, covering roughly 60 percent of the West Bank and remaining under complete Israeli authority. Rather than shrinking as negotiations proceeded, settlement construction in Area C continued and accelerated through the 1990s. The PA gained real governing responsibility over Palestinian population centres (policing, education, health, taxation) but not over borders, most land, water resources, or a horizon toward actual statehood, which subsequent negotiating rounds (Camp David in 2000, Taba in 2001) failed to secure.
Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist opposed to the Oslo process in November 1995. Palestinian suicide bombings by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, aimed at derailing the peace process from the other direction, killed civilians in Israeli cities through the mid-1990s. Both dynamics fed a hardening of Israeli public opinion, and by the end of the decade the sense of momentum toward a final agreement had largely collapsed.
The Second Intifada
Camp David's failure in July 2000, followed by a visit by Likud leader Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount / Haram al-Sharif compound in Jerusalem in September that Palestinians saw as a deliberate provocation, triggered the Second Intifada, a far more violent uprising than the first. It involved Israeli military incursions into Palestinian cities, widespread use of live fire against protesters, and, from the Palestinian side, a shift toward armed attacks including suicide bombings against Israeli civilians in buses, restaurants and markets, tactics condemned internationally as attacks on civilians and that caused enormous loss of Israeli civilian life alongside a much larger death toll among Palestinians, including many civilians, from Israeli military operations.
By the time it wound down around 2005, roughly 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis had been killed. Israel built a separation barrier through and around the West Bank during this period, citing the need to stop attacks; large sections were routed inside the West Bank rather than along the 1949 armistice line, absorbing land and cutting off Palestinian communities from their farmland, an arrangement the International Court of Justice found unlawful in a 2004 advisory opinion.
Disengagement, election, and split
In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew all of its settlers and military infrastructure from Gaza, a move welcomed at the time as a step toward ending the occupation there, though Israel retained control of Gaza's airspace, coastline and, alongside Egypt, most land crossings, leading rights organisations to continue treating it as occupied territory under international law even without a permanent Israeli presence inside it.
In January 2006, Palestinians voted in legislative elections judged free and fair by international observers, and gave a majority to Hamas, running against a Fatah party widely seen as corrupt and ineffective after a decade of Oslo's failures. Israel, the United States and the European Union refused to recognise the result and cut off funding to the PA. Tensions between Hamas and Fatah escalated into open, briefly bloody conflict in Gaza in 2007, ending with Hamas in full control of the Strip and Fatah's PA retaining authority in the West Bank, a political split between the two main Palestinian territories that has never been resolved.
Israel and Egypt responded to Hamas's takeover of Gaza by imposing a blockade on the Strip, restricting the movement of people and goods, that has remained in place, with varying degrees of severity, ever since.