Palestine as a state – what would that actually look like?

This week Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni signalled she's ready to join France and some 150 countries around the world in formally recognising a Palestinian state, subject to conditions, with French President Emmanuel Macron stating in his United Nations address that such a grant of statehood is "a right" and "not a reward”.

The recognition came in response to the extremely dire situation in Gaza, with recent reports from the UN declaring that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians. The war in Gaza started after Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel on 7 October 2023, killing around 1,200 people, many of them civilians.

But how can one recognise a state which only partly exists?

Palestine is not a full-fledged state as defined by the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, which says that any statehood requires a permanent population, defined territorial boundaries, a government and a capacity to enter into relations with other states.

Though it has a Palestinian population, many diplomatic missions abroad and a status of a "permanent observer state" at the UN, much of the Palestinian territories have been occupied by the Israeli military for almost 60 years.

Palestine has no internationally agreed borders, no airport, no army and no official capital. East Jerusalem has been the designated capital in the two-state solution but it has been occupied by Israel since 1967 and is widely considered an occupied territory. Macron himself mentioned in his UN speech that he would open a French embassy in a Palestinian state but didn’t specify where.  

The Montevideo Convention also states that a defined contiguous territory is a requirement for statehood. But the West Bank is not a contiguous territory due to the presence of settlements, and the West Bank and Gaza are disjointed. 

And for a Palestinian state to be internationally recognised and built, Israel’s current government would need to halt its relentless opposition to Palestinian statehood and Israel’s main ally, the United States, would need to agree on a two-state solution, which it no longer does under the leadership of Donald Trump. A full UN membership of Palestine would need to be approved by the UN Security Council, where the US has a veto.

So what would a future Palestinian state look like?

1967 borders

The borders of a future Palestinian state would fit into what Palestinians - as well as UN resolutions - have long asked for, which is an independent state along the 1967 internationally recognised borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Returning to the 1967 borders means that a Palestinian state would be established in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. But the West Bank and East Jerusalem have been occupied and subjected to heavy settlement activity by Israel since the Six-Day War in 1967. There is an estimated 700,000 Jewish settlers living illegally in the West Bank, according to the UN. 

The fate of Gaza, handed back to the Palestinians in 2005 but now de facto taken over by Israel's military and massively destroyed, is unknown.

“That objective of going back to 1967 borders is not fanciful,” said Elena Aoun, an international relations professor and researcher at Belgium’s Catholic University of Louvain. “It benefits from a large consensus in the Palestinian and Arab spheres and also among some Hamas leaders.”

The problem is that since the 1993 Oslo agreements, which attempted to establish a peace process for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “Israeli colonization didn’t cease to grow,” Aoun said.

“It has made achieving Palestinian sovereignty much more complex,” she continued. “Gaza is decimated, and almost uninhabitable, Jerusalem was annexed illegally but recognized by the US, and the West Bank resembles a leopard skin, with the extension of existing colonies, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in rural areas.”

For Aoun, there would be no alternative to having Israel and Palestine sitting at a table together to discuss borders.  

No Hamas in government, but is the PA better?

The Palestinian Authority, led by President Mahmoud Abbas, is the internationally recognised entity that represents the Palestinian people. 

Set up after peace agreements in the 1990s, it governs only in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, while Hamas, which is listed by the EU as a terrorist group, controls the embattled Gaza Strip.

On Monday, Macron pledged a “demilitarised state” of Palestine “recognising Israel” and a “state of Israel recognising a state of Palestine.” He called for the dismantling of Hamas and the creation of “a transitional administration in Gaza,” involving the PA. 

France, he said, would train security forces that would take charge of dismantling Hamas and contribute to an "international stabilisation mission" in Gaza. Abbas himself said in a video message on Monday that an interim constitution would be drafted within three months and called for new elections, a promise he has made since the last presidential and parliamentary elections were held in 2005 and 2006, respectively.

But the PA is distant from its people, powerless and financially strained, partly because of Israel's military occupation in the West Bank. Hamas, by contrast, is more popular among Palestinians, Aoun said, but it has been severely weakened during the war in Gaza.

“Today, what is dangerous is that the international community puts the future of Palestine into the hands of a reformed Palestinian Authority which it has weakened since the 90’s,” Aoun said. 

“Who takes the time to go see the PA in Ramallah to talk about the future of Gaza?" she asked. "Plus, the US didn't even give Abbas a visa to come to the UN General Assembly.”

Reconstruction: who'll foot the bill?

The Israel-Hamas war in Gaza has left the economy of the Palestinian state in shambles. An April 2025 World Bank report stated that the conflict in Gaza “has plunged the Palestinian economy into its deepest contraction in over a generation, with Gaza experiencing near-total economic paralysis and the West Bank facing a deep recession.”

The EU has consistently been the biggest provider of external aid to the Palestinians and in the midst of the war in Gaza, the bloc announced a new aid package worth €120 million. It has also long worked with the PA to establish democratic institutions. But the Israeli army destroyed much of the EU-sponsored infrastructure in Gaza, including schools, roads and hospitals and the long-defunct Gaza airport.

Earlier this month, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the EU would set up a Palestine Donor Group for its reconstruction. “Any future Palestinian state must be viable also from an economic point of view,” von der Leyen said, adding that Europeans would set up a dedicated instrument for Gaza's reconstruction – in coordination with other donors' efforts.

“Gaza must be rebuilt,” von der Leyen said. “The Palestinian economy must be relaunched. And I invite all of you to join in the effort to make this happen.”

Aoun said options like a UN-sponsored oversight committee on the model of the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) which solved a decades-long crisis in Asia’s Timor-Leste could help Palestine to rebuild itself.

Other reconstruction scenarios have been floated such as Trump’s Riviera plans for Gaza or Israel’s possible occupation and annexation of Gaza. At any rate, it is no coincidence that the formal recognition of Palestinian statehood by 10 states at the UN on Monday happened at a meeting co-chaired by Saudi Arabia. France, for starters, expects that rich Gulf countries will foot some of the bill to rebuild Gaza.

The release of Israeli hostages: a major obstacle to Palestine’s formal recognition?

Macron said on Monday that opening an embassy in Palestine would be conditional on the release of the remaining 50 hostages in Gaza, of whom Israel believes around 20 are still alive.

Belgium’s Prime Minister Bart De Wever also made clear that freeing the hostages would be a condition to his country’s complete recognition of Palestinian statehood.

“Belgium will only proceed to the legal recognition of the State of Palestine, once all hostages have been released and all terrorist organisations, such as Hamas, have been removed from the governance of Palestine,” De Wever said.