The Agreement on the Gaza Strip and the Jericho Area, commonly called the Cairo Agreement or the Gaza-Jericho Agreement, was signed in Cairo on May 4, 1994 by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. President Hosni Mubarak hosted, and the agreement was witnessed by the United States and Russia as co-sponsors of the Madrid-Oslo track. This was the first operational agreement implementing the September 1993 Declaration of Principles, and it was the moment at which Israeli territorial withdrawal under the Oslo framework moved from text to ground. Within three weeks of signing, Israel had withdrawn from most of the Gaza Strip and from the town of Jericho, and the Palestinian Authority had begun operating on Palestinian territory for the first time in its history.
What Israel withdrew from
The agreement defined a “Gaza Strip” area (excluding the Israeli settlements and their access roads, which remained under Israeli control pending final status) and a “Jericho Area” of roughly 65 square kilometers around the Jordan Valley town. Israel Defense Forces began withdrawing from the specified zones on May 13, 1994 and completed the initial redeployment on May 18, 1994. Israeli military government structures were dismantled, civil administration offices were transferred, and detailed handover procedures for prisons, courts, records, and revenues were executed under the agreement’s annexes. The UN Peacemaker database archives the full text, including the security arrangements annex that established the joint patrols, coordination mechanisms, and the initial Palestinian police force.
What powers the PA received
The Palestinian Authority received legislative, executive, and judicial powers within the specified areas, covering most civil spheres: education, health, social welfare, direct taxation, tourism, and internal security for Palestinians. A Palestinian police force of up to 9,000 personnel was authorized. Israel retained responsibility for external security, the settlements, Israeli citizens, and overall security of the borders. This was not a sovereign state, and the agreement did not claim it was. It was an interim self-governing authority operating on transferred Israeli military government functions.
Why Gaza and Jericho were chosen first
The choice reflected a specific logic. Gaza was administratively separate from the West Bank, had a distinct population geography, and presented the most difficult security challenges, which made it the proof-of-concept case. Jericho, small and relatively easy to isolate, allowed a West Bank foothold for the new authority without addressing the more politically fraught cities like Nablus or Hebron. Together, the two zones gave the Palestinian Authority an operational base to build institutions while deferring the harder questions to later agreements.
What the agreement proved
The Gaza-Jericho Agreement proved, within eight months of the September 1993 Declaration of Principles, that Israel was willing and operationally capable of carrying out real territorial redeployment in pursuit of the Oslo framework. The State Department’s Office of the Historian treats it as the founding operational act of the Oslo implementation period. For the land-for-peace record, it is first-order evidence that the process delivered real withdrawal, not only declarations.
What it did not resolve
The agreement did not address Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, final borders, or Palestinian statehood. It did not remove Israeli settlements from Gaza; those remained in place until the 2005 unilateral disengagement. It did not provide for full sovereignty. It did not prevent the rise of Hamas suicide bombings, which began in April 1994 (before the agreement was even signed) and accelerated during 1995-1996. The interim self-government structure created in Gaza in 1994 would be overtaken by the Hamas electoral victory in 2006 and the violent Hamas takeover of 2007. The Jericho area remains under Palestinian Authority control to the present day, though the broader interim structure has long since ceased to function as originally designed. Gaza-Jericho is therefore useful evidence of early Oslo-era territorial compromise, and equally useful evidence that early compromise did not produce durable peace.