Palestine document photos online

Long before the modern debates over its statehood, Palestine quietly pioneered something most countries never attempt: a fully trilingual currency. When the London-based Palestine Currency Board issued the Palestine pound on 1 November 1927, every coin and banknote carried the same value in Arabic, English and Hebrew side by side, and the pound was split not into 100 but 1,000 tiny units called mils. Pegged one-to-one with British sterling, it circulated across the British Mandate, and after 1948 lingered on as legal tender in Israel until 1952, in Jordan, and in Gaza until April 1951 - a single money outliving the authority that made it.

• Currency The Palestine pound, issued from 1927, was divided into 1,000 mils and printed in three languages - Arabic, English and Hebrew - on every note and coin.
• Currency Palestine has had no national currency of its own for decades: the West Bank and Gaza today run on the Israeli shekel, the Jordanian dinar and the US dollar all at once, with the dinar often kept for savings and the shekel for daily shopping.
• Passport The Palestinian Authority issued its very first passport on 1 April 1995 - a diplomatic document signed by Yasser Arafat and handed to negotiator Saeb Erekat the day before ordinary passports began.
• Passport power The Palestinian passport ranks 91st on the Henley Passport Index, granting visa-free or visa-on-arrival entry to roughly 53 destinations - and sits tied with Libya and North Korea.
• Passport color Palestine issues three passport types by color: red for diplomats, black for ordinary citizens, plus separate travel documents for refugees in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt who lack an ID card.
• Documents To even apply for a Palestinian passport you must first hold a 'hawwiya' identity card, the registry of which is tied to Israeli-controlled population records - and the passport costs just 35 Jordanian dinars and expires after five years.
• Biometrics Palestine only joined the biometric passport era in March 2022, embedding digitized photos, fingerprints and signatures into its travel document decades after it first issued one.
• Statehood On 29 November 2012 the UN General Assembly upgraded Palestine to non-member observer state by 138 votes to 9, after which it began re-titling its passports, postage stamps and official papers as the 'State of Palestine'.
• Recognition By September 2025 the State of Palestine was recognized by around 157 of the UN's 193 member states - over 80% of the world - including a 2025 wave from the UK, Canada, Australia and France.