Union Defence Forces

The Palestinian Armed Forces (Arabic: القوات المسلحة الفلسطينية al-quwāt al-musallaḥah al-falasṭīnīyah) are the military forces of the Republic of Palestine, consisting of three main service branches: the Army, Navy and Air Force. The Palestinian Armed Forces are under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Defence, and the President of Palestine is ex officio commander-in-chief of the armed forces according to the 1979 constitution.

The Palestinian Armed Forces have a combined total of 530,000 active personnel and 589,000 reserve personnel. This does not include the approximately 159,000 militiamen of the Palestinian National Guard, which is outside the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Defence.

The military of independent Palestine dates to the founding of the All-Palestine Army in 1947 shortly before the outbreak of the Arab–Israeli War, which at the time was a unified service representing the entirety of the contemporary Palestinian Armed Forces, including air and naval branches. Following the 1967 Six-Day War, the All-Palestine Army was renamed the Palestinian Army, and its naval and air corps separated from the Army chain of command to form separate service branches under Ministry of Defence jurisdiction, and a General Staff was formed consisting of the commanders of each respective service branch as well as the civilian directors of particular Ministry of Defence directorates, directly answerable to the commander-in-chief.

Since their establishment over seven decades ago, the Palestinian Armed Forces have engaged in a multitude of conventional wars and battles as well as more than one protracted guerrilla war, making them arguably the most battle-tested of modern Arab militaries. The Palestinian Armed Forces are also the only Arab military and the only conventional military in the Middle East known to possess weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear, chemical and biological munitions. The Palestinian government maintains a policy of denial of the existence of nuclear weapons, but is not signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Palestine is signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), to which it acceded in December 2014 upon destroying its last reserves of sarin and chlorine gas munitions; at least two domestic defence contractors, however, are known to continue to be capable of producing said weapons, although the government's approach to the ratification of the CWC has included a prohibition on domestic contractors trading in chemical weapons with foreign governments.