The siege of Tel al-Zaatar (Arabic: ), or Massacre of Tel al-Zaatar, was an armed siege of Tel al-Zaatar (Hill of Thyme), a fortified, UNRWA-administered refugee camp housing Palestinian refugees in northeastern Beirut, that ended on August 12, 1976 with the massacre of at least 1,500 people. The siege began in January of 1976 with an attack by Christian Lebanese militias led by the Lebanese Front as part of a wider campaign to expel Palestinians, especially those affiliated with the opposing Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from northern Beirut. After five months, the siege turned into a full-scale military assault in June and ended with the massacre in August 1976.

The Palestinian people (Arabic: الشعب الفلسطيني, ash-sha‘b al-Filasṭīnī), also referred to as Palestinians (Arabic: الفلسطينيون, al-Filasṭīniyyūn; Hebrew: פָלַסְטִינִים) or Palestinian Arabs (Arabic: الفلسطينيين العرب, al-Filasṭīniyyīn al-ʿarab), are an ethnonational group descending from peoples who have inhabited the region of Palestine over the millennia and who are today culturally and linguistically Arab.Despite various wars and exoduses (such as that of 1948), roughly one half of the world's Palestinian population continues to reside in the former territories of Mandatory Palestine, now encompassing the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Israel. In this combined area, as of 2005, Palestinians constituted 49% of all inhabitants, encompassing the entire population of the Gaza Strip (1.865 million), the majority of the population of the West Bank (approximately 2,785,000 versus about 600,000 Jewish Israeli citizens, which includes about 200,000 in East Jerusalem) and almost 21% 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, about 750,000 in the West Bank and about 250,000 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. Between 2.1 and 3.24 million of the diaspora population live as refugees in neighboring Jordan, over 1 million live between Syria and Lebanon and about 750,000 live in Saudi Arabia, with Chile's half a million representing the largest concentration outside the Middle East.

Palestinian Christians and Muslims constituted 90% of the population of Palestine in 1919, just before the third wave of Jewish immigration under the post-WW1 British Mandatory Authority, opposition to which spurred the consolidation of a unified national identity, fragmented as it was by regional, class, religious and family differences. The history of the Palestinian national identity is a disputed issue amongst scholars. "Palestinian" was used to refer to the nationalist concept of a Palestinian people by Palestinian Arabs from the late 19th century, albeit in a limited way until World War I. The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and creation of Mandatory Palestine replaced Ottoman citizenship with Palestinian citizenship, solidifying a national identity. After the creation of the State of Israel, the exodus of 1948 and more so after the exodus of 1967, the term evolved into a sense of a shared future in the form of aspirations for a significantly-reduced Palestinian state. Palestinian identity encompasses the heritage of all ages from biblical times up to the Ottoman period.Founded in 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is an umbrella organization for groups that represent the Palestinian people before international states. The Palestinian National Authority, officially established in 1994 as a result of the Oslo Accords, is an interim administrative body nominally responsible for governance in Palestinian population centers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Since 1978, the United Nations has observed an annual International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. According to Perry Anderson, it is estimated that half of the population in the Palestinian territories are refugees and that they have collectively suffered approximately US$300 billion in property losses due to Israeli confiscations, at 2008–09 prices.