The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has its roots in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the birth of major nationalist movements among the Jews and among the Arabs, both geared towards attaining sovereignty for their people in the Middle East. The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British government in 1917 during the First World War announcing support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. The conflict is over who gets what land and how it’s controlled. Israel is the world’s only Jewish state, located just east of the Mediterranean Sea. Palestinians, the Arab population that hails from the land Israel now controls, refer to the territory as Palestine, and want to establish a state by that name on all or part of the same land. An early United Nations plan to give each group part of the land failed, and Israel and the surrounding Arab nations fought several wars over the territory. Today’s lines largely reflect the outcomes of two of these wars, one waged in 1948 and another in 1967. The 1967 war is particularly important for today’s conflict, as it left Israel in control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, two territories home to large Palestinian populations. The internationally supported political solution to the broader conflict, endorsed in the past by both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, is a so-called “two-state solution.” That would establish Palestine as an independent state in Gaza and most of the West Bank, leaving Israel with control of the rest of the West Bank, as well as Jerusalem. Currently, Israel is at war with Hamas, a conflict following a horrific rampage on October 7, 2023, in which militants from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another extremist group, launched attacks that killed more than 1,400 Israelis and took more than 240 hostage. Israel has responded with widespread bombardment of the Gaza Strip and a ground incursion, killing and injuring tens of thousands of Palestinians.