1947–1948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine in the context of "Palestinian territories"

Israel, officially the State of Israel, is a country in the Southern Levant region of West Asia. It borders Lebanon to the north, Syria to the northeast, Jordan to the east and Egypt to the southwest. Israel occupies the Palestinian territories of the West Bank in the east and the Gaza Strip in the southwest, as well as the Syrian Golan Heights in the northeast. Israel's western coast lies on the Mediterranean Sea, the southern tip reaches the Red Sea, and the east includes the Earth's lowest point near the Dead Sea. Jerusalem is the government seat and proclaimed capital, while Tel Aviv is Israel's largest urban area and economic centre.

The Land of Israel is synonymous with Palestine or the Holy Land. In antiquity it was home to the Canaanites and later the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Its location at a continental crossroads brought demographic shifts under various empires. Nineteenth-century European antisemitism fuelled the Zionist movement for a Jewish homeland. Britain endorsed this goal in the 1917 Balfour Declaration and ruled Mandatory Palestine from 1920. Jewish immigration and British policies intensified Arab-Jewish tensions, and the 1947 United Nations (UN) Partition Plan led to a civil war.

The Mediterranean and Middle East theatre, also known as the Mediterranean Theater of War, was a major theatre of operations during the Second World War. The vast size of the theatre saw interconnected land, naval, and air campaigns fought for control of the Mediterranean Sea, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Middle East and Southern Europe. Despite their disparate geographic locations and objectives, these operations were not seen as neatly separated from each other, but part of an extensive, contiguous theatre of war.

The Mediterranean theater had the longest duration of the Second World War. Combat started on 10 June 1940 with Italy's declaration of war against the United Kingdom and France and ended on 2 May 1945 when all Axis forces in Italy surrendered. In Germany military history, the scope of the theatre is described as Mediterranean, South-East Europe, and North Africa 1939–1941. Additionally, various post-war conflicts, such as the Greek Civil War and the first phase of the Palestine War, were rooted in events during the Mediterranean theater.

The 1948 Palestine war was fought in the territory of what had been, at the start of the war, British-ruled Mandatory Palestine. During the war, Zionist forces conquered territory and established the State of Israel, over 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from Palestine, the British withdrew from their Mandate of Palestine, and four neighbouring Arab nations entered the territory and joined the war. By the end of the war, the State of Israel had held or captured about 78% of former territory of the mandate, the Kingdom of Jordan had captured and later annexed the area that became the West Bank, and Egypt had captured the Gaza Strip. The war formally ended with the 1949 Armistice Agreements, which established the State of Israel and laid out the Green Line demarcating these territories. It was the first war of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the broader Arab–Israeli conflict.

The war had two main phases, the first being the 1947–1948 civil war, which began on 30 November 1947, a day after the United Nations voted to adopt the Partition Plan for Palestine, which planned for the division of the territory into Jewish and Arab sovereign states. During this period, the British still maintained a declining rule over Palestine and occasionally intervened in the violence. Initially on the defensive, the Zionist forces switched to the offensive in April 1948. In anticipation of an invasion by Arab armies, they enacted Plan Dalet, an operation aimed at securing territory for the establishment of a Jewish state.

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is an ongoing military and political conflict about land and self-determination within the territory of the former Mandatory Palestine. Key aspects of the conflict include the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the status of Jerusalem, Israeli settlements, borders, security, water rights, the permit regime in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian freedom of movement, and the Palestinian right of return.

The conflict has its origins in the rise of Zionism in the late 19th century in Europe, a movement which aimed to establish a Jewish state through the colonization of Palestine, synchronously with the first arrival of Jewish settlers to Ottoman Palestine in 1882. The Zionist movement garnered the support of an imperial power in the 1917 Balfour Declaration issued by Britain, which promised to support the creation of a "Jewish homeland" in Palestine. Following British occupation of the formerly Ottoman region during World War I, Mandatory Palestine was established as a British mandate. Increasing Jewish immigration led to tensions between Jews and Arabs, which grew into intercommunal conflict. In 1936, an Arab revolt erupted, demanding independence and an end to British support for Zionism, which was suppressed by the British. Eventually, tensions led to the United Nations adopting a partition plan in 1947, triggering a civil war.

The 1948 Arab–Israeli War, also known as the First Arab–Israeli War, followed the civil war in Mandatory Palestine as the second and final stage of the 1948 Palestine war. The civil war became a war of separate states with the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948, the end of the British Mandate for Palestine at midnight, and the entry of a military coalition of Arab states into the territory of Mandatory Palestine the following morning. The war formally ended with the 1949 Armistice Agreements which established the Green Line.

Since the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the 1920 creation of the British Mandate of Palestine, and in the context of Zionism and the mass migration of European Jews to Palestine, there had been tension and conflict between Arabs, Jews, and the British in Palestine. The conflict escalated into a civil war 30 November 1947, the day after the United Nations adopted the Partition Plan for Palestine proposing to divide the territory into an Arab state, a Jewish state, and an internationally administered corpus separatum for the cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem.