During this time, Christianity became a dominant religion towards the end of the Roman Empire. In 636 came an Arab conquest, beginning the spread of Islam. In the 11th century, Christians in Europe launched several crusades to bring the Holy City back to the hand of the Christians while from the 16th century, more and more Jews were joining a movement called Zionism aiming to create a Jewish national state in its ancient homeland.

WWI exploded in 1918 and ended with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Its land in the Middle East was carved by the British and French Empires. The region under the control of Britain was what it called the British mandate for Palestine. Tensions between the Jews and the Arabs who both claimed the land grew, which even led to acts of violence.

In 1947, the UN partitioned Palestine into two independent states: a Jewish state and an Arab state with the City of Jerusalem becoming an international zone with a special status. Less than one year after that, Israel declared itself an independent state.

Right after the declaration, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War broke out and ended when a cease-fire agreement was reached in 1949, giving more than two-thirds of historic Palestine, including West Jerusalem, to Israel. There came more wars and fighting in the following decades, namely the Six-Day War ending with the victory of Israel, the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon kicking the Palestinian Liberation Organization out of Beirut, the First Intifada ending with the Oslo Accords, the Second Intifada ending with Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza.

Then came the establishment of Hamas, a Sunni Islamist militant group founded in 1987, aiming to destroy the state of Israel and create an Islamic state. After the Battle of Gaza (a conflict between Hamas and Fatah), Hamas split from the Palestinian authority and gained power in the Gaza while the West Bank was separately controlled by the PLO.