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| - Israel, which holds legislative elections on Tuesday, has become the Middle East's military powerhouse since declaring independence in 1948 as the British withdrew from mandate Palestine. Here are some facts about the country. Israel is considered the leading military power in the Middle East and is widely believed to possess its sole, if undeclared, nuclear arsenal. It has had a series of wars with its Arab neighbours, the first of which broke out on May 15, 1948, a day after Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the country's creation. Officially Israel has been through eight conflicts, including the Six-Day War of June 1967 in which it seized the West Bank and east Jerusalem from Jordan, the Gaza Strip, Egypt's Sinai and the strategic Golan Heights from Syria. It later annexed east Jerusalem and the Golan, moves denounced by the international community. Israel has faced two Palestinian uprisings or intifadas -- 1987-1993 and 2000-2005. The first ended with the signing in Washington of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Its last major military operation was in 2014 in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, from which Israel unilaterally withdrew in 2005. Israel's population has increased tenfold since 1948, reaching 9.3 million, according to official statistics. More than 475,000 Israeli settlers live uneasily alongside though mostly apart from 2.8 million Palestinians in the West Bank. More than 200,000 Israelis live in settlements in east Jerusalem. The international community regards the settlements as illegal and an obstacle to peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Israel considers Jerusalem to be its "indivisible" capital, while the Palestinians want to make the east of the city the capital of their future state. Under former US president Donald Trump, Washington was a staunch ally of Israel, recognising Jerusalem as capital of the Jewish state, and in 2017 its annexation of the Golan Heights. It backed Israel's settlement policy and sponsored its normalisation of ties with Arab countries. Since mid-2020 four Arab countries -- the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco -- have normalised their relations with Israel, to the Palestinians' ire. Egypt and Jordan were the first Arab countries to recognise and sign peace deals with Israel, in 1979 and 1994 respectively. Officially in a state of war with Syria, Israel has sought to avoid direct involvement in the country's civil war that began in 2011. But it has made hundreds of strikes on what it says are Iranian targets in Syria, where elite Iranian forces and allied militias support President Bashar al-Assad. Israel's hi-tech sector employs 10 percent of its workforce, giving the country the nickname the "start-up nation". However, tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs due to the coronavirus pandemic, notably in the service sector which has been shut down by lockdown measures. In December it launched a massive Covid-19 vaccination campaign that has led the world, with more half of the population having received the necessary two jabs. bur-acm/jmy/fg/par
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