Backgrounder: History and current status of the holy city Jerusalem

RAMALLAH/GAZA, Dec. 8 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced his official recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital and instructed moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which has triggered a wave of anger and criticism around the world.

The following are some key facts about the history and current status of Jerusalem.

Jerusalem, located on a plateau in the Judaean Mountains between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea, is considered a holy city in three major Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Under the 1947 United Nations (UN) Partition Plan to divide historical Palestine between Jewish and Arab states, Jerusalem was granted special status based on its religious origin.

In the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, or the First Arab-Israeli, Zionist forces took control of the western part of the city.

To formally end the war, Israel and neighboring Egypt, Lebanon and Syria signed a set of armistice agreements in 1949 and established armistice lines between Israeli forces and Arab forces, which at the end of the war divided Jerusalem into two, namely East and West Jerusalem.

During the Third Arab-Israeli War in 1967, Israel captured the eastern half of Jerusalem, which was under Jordanian control at that time, and claimed unilaterally both East and West Jerusalem under its sovereignty and civil law. Since then, Israel has built housing complexes, known as "settlements", in the region in an attempt to change the demographic makeup.

In 1980, the Israeli parliament passed the "Basic Law: Jerusalem, Capital of Israel," declaring the "complete and united" city of Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel. But in response, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 478, claiming that the law was "null and void."

Following the withdrawals of Egypt from Sinai and Gaza in 1982 and Jordan from the West Bank in 1988, the Palestine National Council proclaimed national independence in Algiers, "with holy Jerusalem as its capital."

With the continued efforts of the international community, Palestine and Israel started peace talks in the early 1990s. After a series of meetings between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, the two sides in 1993 came to agreement formulating the Oslo Peace Accords, a plan discussing the necessary elements and conditions for a future Palestinian state.

Various "transfers of power and responsibilities" in the Gaza Strip and West Bank from Israel to the Palestinian took place in the mid 1990s.

After the former Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Rabin who signed the Oslo Accords was assassinated in 1995, the peace process came to a grinding halt. Further attacks and retaliatory actions from both sides made conditions for peace negotiations untenable.

The UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly on Nov. 29, 2012 to grant Palestine non-member observer State status after Palestine called on the UN to use its influence to help break the long impasse in the peace talks.

Although the U.S. Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 which required the relocation of the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, former U.S. presidents, including George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, consistently renewed a presidential waiver every six months to delay the relocation for the sake of national security interests.

The city's status remains one of the main sticking points for the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations as both Israelis and Palestinians see Jerusalem as their capital. So far, the international community does not recognize Israeli sovereignty over the entire city, believing its status should be resolved in negotiations. No other country bases its embassy in the city. Enditem