The Palestinian people, also referred to as Palestinians or Palestinian Arabs, are an Arabic-speaking people with family origins in Palestine. The total Palestinian population is estimated at approximately 12 million, roughly less than half continuing to live within the boundaries of what was Mandate Palestine, an area encompassing Israel proper, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. In this combined area, as of 2009, they constitute 49% of all inhabitants, some of whom are internally displaced. The remainder, over half of all Palestinians, comprise what is known as the Palestinian diaspora, of whom more than half are stateless refugees, lacking citizenship in any country. Of the diaspora, about 1.9 million live in neighboring Jordan,one and a half million between Syria and Lebanon, a quarter million in Saudi Arabia, while Chile's half a million are the largest concentration outside the Arab world.

By religious affiliation, most Palestinians are Muslim, particularly of the Sunni branch of Islam, and there is a significant Palestinian Christian minority of various Christian denominations. As the commonly applied "Palestinian Arab" ethnonym implies, the current traditional vernacular of Palestinians, irrespective of religion, is the Palestinian dialect of Arabic. For those who are Arab citizens of Israel, many are now also bilingual in Modern Hebrew. Recent genetic evidence has demonstrated that Palestinians as an ethnic group are closely related to Jews and represent modern "descendants of a core population that lived in the area since prehistoric times," largely predating the Arabian Muslim conquest that resulted in their acculturation, established Arabic as the predominant vernacular, and over time also Islamized many of them from various prior faiths.

The first widespread use of "Palestinian" as an endonym to refer to the nationalist concept of a Palestinian people by the local Arabic-speaking population of Palestine began prior to the outbreak of World War I, and the first demand for national independence was issued by the Syrian-Palestinian Congress on 21 September 1921. After the creation of Israel, the exodus of 1948, and more so after the exodus of 1967, the term came to signify not only a place of origin, but the sense of a shared past and future in the form of a Palestinian nation-state. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) represents the Palestinian people before the international community. The Palestinian National Authority, officially established as a result of the Oslo Accords, is an interim administrative body nominally responsible for governance in Palestinian population centres in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.