Open chattel slavery existed in the region of Palestine until the 20th century. The slave trade to Ottoman Palestine officially stopped in the 1870s, when the last slave ship is registered to have arrived, after which slavery appeared to have gradually diminished to a marginal phenomenon in the census of 1905. However, the former slaves and their children still continued to work for their former enslavers, and were reported to still live in a state of de facto servitude in the 1930s. Many members of the Black Palestinians minority are descendants of the former slaves.

Palestine was historically a part of bigger states, and the institution of slavery in the area was consequently represented by the institution of slavery in the Rashidun Caliphate (632–661), the slavery in the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750), slavery in the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1099), slavery in the Mamluk Sultanate (1187–1516), and finally of the slavery in the Ottoman Empire between 1516 and 1917, all of which were empires in which the area of Palestine was a part of.

Palestine was close to the Red Sea slave trade, from which African slaves where trafficked by pilgrims returning from the Hajj, and also to the slave ports of the Mediterranean Sea, where African slaves from the Trans-Saharan slave trade were imported via Libya and Egypt. European slaves were imported from the Black Sea region in the North East from first the Crimean slave trade and later from the Circassian slave trade.

The Ottoman Empire issued decrees to restrict and gradually phase out the slave trade between 1830 and 1909, but these laws were not strictly enforced in the Ottoman provinces, such as Palestine and the Arabian Peninsula.

In 1880, the Ottoman Empire conceded to Britain the right to search and seize any vessel to Ottoman territories suspected of carrying slaves by the Anglo-Ottoman Convention of 1880. The British occupation of Egypt in 1882 seriously disturbed the import of slaves to the Mediterranean provinces of the Ottoman Empire, since a large part of the slave import had come via Egypt. The Anglo-Egyptian Slave Trade Convention officially banned the slave trade from Sudan to Egypt, thus formally putting an end on the import of slaves from Sudan. Formally, the Ottoman Empire declared black slaves manumitted in 1889.

The last official slave ship arrived to Haifa in Palestine in 1876, after which the official slave trade to Palestine appeared to have stopped. The end of the open slave trade also appeared to have resulted in the gradual death of slavery itself. In the 1905 census for Palestine, only eight individuals were officially registered as slaves. However, while no longer officially referred to as slaves, it appeared as if the former slaves continued to work for their former enslavers, as did their children.

In the last decades of open slavery in Palestine, the origin of slaves appeared to have been similar to other Ottoman provinces at the time: a minority were Caucasians (usually Circassians), but the vast majority of the slaves were of African origin, mostly from Ethiophia (Abyssinia) and the Sudan.

Slaves were given tasks which were regarded as disdained and degrading to free Muslims, such as domestic servants, municipal services, industrial work, sex slaves (concubines), and farmhands and sharecroppers. As commonly in other parts of the Muslim world, slaves were preferred to free employed people as domestic servants, since they were dependent on their employer and not loyal to their clan and their own families.