Prime Minister Mackenzie King once said Canada has "too much geography, too little history." The exact opposite applies to the tense situation between Israelis and Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip where – as The New Yorker says about the crisis in the Middle East – "there is too much history and too little geography."

Palestinians amid the rubble in Jenin

As CBC News Online's Gary Katz explains in his indepth piece on the Middle East, the land where Israel now sits could fit into New Brunswick 3½ times, but the stories, the politics, the passions – and the complexities – reach back to antiquity. The situation in 2002 remains as much a snarl as ever, including the years immediately following the creation of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948.

When the dust had settled, Israel controlled three-quarters of what was Palestine, Jordan took control of the West Bank of the Jordan River, and Egypt took over the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians took over nothing, except the transient security of life in refugee camps throughout the region.

In the wave of incursions into the West Bank that began on March 29, Israeli troops, tanks, helicopters and bulldozers moved in on the towns and refugee camps in or near Ramallah, Beit Jala, Qalqilya, Tulkarm, Bethlehem, Jenin, Salfit, Nablus, Hebron, Qabatiyah, Yatta and Dura.

The bloodiest and most significant battle took place in Jenin in the northern end of the West Bank. For days the Israelis designated Jenin a "closed military area," which meant no journalists and aid workers allowed. The Israelis considered Jenin the centre of Palestinian suicide-bomber attacks.

Palestinian militants surprised Israeli troops with fierce resistance, some fighting to their last bullets. The Jenin refugee camp was home to 14,000 Palestinians, most of them in cramped cinder-block houses. Estimates of those killed and injured varied, but the Israelis claimed to have killed some 100 Palestinians, arrested 700 others and suffered 23 casualties.

Many of the Palestinians killed were civilians, some when their homes were bulldozed with them inside. The Palestinians talked of a "massacre" of more than 500 Palestinians by the Israelis, and said nearly the entire camp population was left homeless. The Israelis called this propaganda.

The United Nations appointed a fact-finding mission to investigate what happened in Jenin.

In its final report, the UN team found fault on both sides. It found that 52 Palestinians had died. That's far fewer than the 500 initially reported dead. It also said that 23 Israeli soldiers were killed.

The report faulted Palestinian militants for booby-trapping houses and potentially putting civilians in danger. It also faulted Israelis, however, for using heavy artillery and rockets in densely populated communities.

Israeli troops damaged or destroyed a number of schools, saying that they were institutions used to support terrorism. The UN report cited the Israeli actions as the reason for the collapse of the West Bank economy. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan publicly acknowledged the humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian community.

Although the term "massacre" had been previously used to describe the incident at Jenin, the UN left that term out of its report.

More than three million Palestinian refugees live in the 59 UN-operated refugee camps and surrounding areas. The largest number of refugees is in Jordan, with nearly 240,000 reported to be in camps and another 1.3 million living outside of the camps.

The UN also operates refugee camps in these regions (with their refugee populations):

• Syria (383,000)
• Gaza Strip (363,000)
• Lebanon (376,500)
• Saudi Arabia (275,000)
• West Bank (132,000)
• Iraq (90,000)
• Egypt (40,500)
• Libya (8,500)
• Algeria (4,000)
• Tunisia (300)

According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), Palestinian refugees "are persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1949 Arab-Israeli conflict." UNRWA estimates the number of registered Palestinian refugees has grown from 914,000 in 1950 to more than 3.8 million in 2001, and keeps rising.

Some camps are in urban areas, in or close to towns such as Jenin. Others are in sparsely populated rural areas. After the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the different refugee camps fell under three zones – A-zone, B-zone, C-zone. The A-zone camps are under Palestinian control, B-zone camps are under joint Palestinian/Israeli control, and C-zone camps are under Israeli control.

Refugee camp residents run their own activities, with the committees in each camp regarded as official bodies by the UN under the wing of the UNRWA. In the West Bank camps there are facilities for women, disabled refugees and youth. The UNRWA runs 98 elementary schools and preparatory schools in the West Bank camps, which in 1998-99 had 51,944 pupils. UNRWA operates primary health-care facilities, with a 43-bed hospital in the town of Qalqilya. Host countries are responsible for administering and policing refugee camps.

The refugee crisis, combined with the Palestinian "right of return," have been major obstacles to various peace proposals over the years in the Middle East. The most recent peace proposal from Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah did not mention the Palestinian right of return. Israel fears the return of more than three million Palestinian refugees would undermine the Jewish identity of Israel.