Palestinians (Arabic: الفلسطينيون, romanized: al-Filasṭīniyyūn) are an Arab ethnonational group native to the Levantine region of Palestine. They represent a highly homogeneous community who share a cultural and ethnic identity, speak Palestinian Arabic and share close religious, linguistic, and cultural ties with other Levantine Arabs.

In 1919, Palestinian Muslims and Christians constituted 90 percent of the population of Palestine, just before the third wave of Jewish immigration and the setting up of British Mandatory Palestine after World War I. Opposition to Jewish immigration spurred the consolidation of a unified national identity, though Palestinian society was still fragmented by regional, class, religious, and family differences. The history of the Palestinian national identity is a disputed issue amongst scholars. For some, the term "Palestinian" is used to refer to the nationalist concept of a Palestinian people by Palestinian Arabs from the late 19th century and in the pre-World War I period, while others assert the Palestinian identity encompasses the heritage of all eras from biblical times up to the Ottoman period. After the Israeli Declaration of Independence, the 1948 Palestinian expulsion, and more so after the 1967 Palestinian exodus, the term "Palestinian" evolved into a sense of a shared future in the form of aspirations for a Palestinian state. Though the concept of Palestinian citizenship for the purpose of international law has been revived, the in fieri realization of self-determination is still insufficient, thus Palestinians remain over the threshold of eligibility to receive international protection as refugees and stateless persons.

Founded in 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization is an umbrella organization for groups that represent the Palestinian people before international states. The Palestinian National Authority, officially established in 1994 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 the Gaza Strip. Since 1978, the United Nations has observed an annual International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. According to British historian Perry Anderson, it is estimated that half of the population in the Palestinian territories are refugees.

Despite various wars and exoduses, roughly one half of the world's Palestinian population continues to reside in the territory of former Mandatory Palestine, now encompassing Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In Israel proper, Palestinians constitute almost 21 percent of the population as part of its Arab citizens. Many are Palestinian refugees or internally displaced Palestinians, including over 1.4 million in the Gaza Strip, over 870,000 in the West Bank, and around 250,000 in Israel proper. Of the Palestinian population who live abroad, known as the Palestinian diaspora, more than half are stateless, lacking legal citizenship in any country. 2.3 million of the diaspora population are registered as refugees in neighboring Jordan, most of whom hold Jordanian citizenship; over 1 million live between Syria and Lebanon, and about 750,000 live in Saudi Arabia, with Chile holding the largest Palestinian diaspora concentration (around half a million) outside of the Arab world.

The Greek toponym Palaistínē (Παλαιστίνη), which is the origin of the Arabic Filasṭīn (فلسطين), first occurs in the work of the 5th century BCE Greek historian Herodotus, where it denotes generally the coastal land from Phoenicia down to Egypt. Herodotus also employs the term as an ethnonym, as when he speaks of the "Syrians of Palestine" or "Palestinian-Syrians", an ethnically amorphous group he distinguishes from the Phoenicians. Herodotus makes no distinction between the inhabitants of Palestine.

The Greek word reflects an ancient Eastern Mediterranean-Near Eastern word which was used either as a toponym or ethnonym. In Ancient Egyptian Peleset/Purusati has been conjectured to refer to the "Sea Peoples", particularly the Philistines. Among Semitic languages, Akkadian Palaštu (variant Pilištu) is used of 7th-century Philistia and its, by then, four city states. Biblical Hebrew's cognate word Plištim, is usually translated Philistines.

When the Romans conquered the region in the first century BCE, they used the name Judaea for the province that covered most of the region. At the same time, the name Syria Palestina continued to be used by historians and geographers to refer to the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, as in the writings of Philo, Josephus and Pliny the Elder. During the early 2nd century CE, Syria Palaestina became the official administrative name in a move viewed by scholars as an attempt by emperor Hadrian to disassociate Jews from the land as punishment for the Bar Kokhba revolt. Jacobson suggested the change to be rationalized by the fact that the new province was far larger. The name was thenceforth inscribed on coins, and beginning in the fifth century, mentioned in rabbinic texts. The Arabic word Filastin has been used to refer to the region since the time of the earliest medieval Arab geographers. It appears to have been used as an Arabic adjectival noun in the region since as early as the 7th century.

In modern times, the first person to self-describe Palestine's Arabs as "Palestinians" was Khalil Beidas in 1898, followed by Salim Quba'in and Najib Nassar in 1902. After the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, which eased press censorship laws in the Ottoman Empire, dozens of newspapers and periodicals were founded in Palestine, and the term "Palestinian" expanded in usage. Among those were the Al-Quds, Al-Munadi, Falastin, Al-Karmil and Al-Nafir newspapers, which used the term "Filastini" more than 170 times in 110 articles from 1908 to 1914. They also made references to a "Palestinian society", "Palestinian nation", and a "Palestinian diaspora". Article writers included Christian and Muslim Arab Palestinians, Palestinian emigrants, and non-Palestinian Arabs. The Palestinian Arab Christian Falastin newspaper had addressed its readers as Palestinians since its inception in 1911 during the Ottoman period.