text: The 1949 Armistice Agreements that Israel signed with its neighbours left 78% of Palestine (17.5% of the 1921-1946 territory of the Mandate which included Transjordan) in its hands. The remaining territories, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were occupied by Egypt and annexed by Transjordan, respectively.\nAdditionally, the war created about 750,000 Palestinian refugees who had lived inside Israel's borders. It also brought about the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab lands to Israel.\nIn 1949, Israel offered to allow families that had been separated during the war to return, to release refugee accounts frozen in Israeli banks (these were eventually released in 1953), to pay compensation for abandoned lands, and to repatriate 100,000 refugees (about 15% of those who had fled). This number would have included some 35,000 refugees whose return had already been negotiated and was underway. The Arabs rejected this compromise, at least in part because they were unwilling to take any action that might be construed as recognition of Israel. They made repatriation a precondition for negotiations, which Israel rejected. [Palestine Conciliation Commission, September 1949; Prittie, 1975].\nIn the face of this impasse, Israel didn't allow any of the Arabs who fled to return and, with the exception of Transjordan, the host countries where they ended up did not grant them — or their descendants — citizenship. As of today, most of them, and their offspring, still live in refugee camps. The question of how their situation should be resolved remains one of the main issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.\nAbout 900,000 Jews either were expelled from or voluntarily left their Arab homelands in the Middle East and North Africa. Roughly two thirds of these settled in Israel.