15 November has been celebrated as the independence day of the Palestinian people since 1988 when a Palestinian Declaration of Independence was written by poet Mahmoud Darwish and then declared by PLO leader Yasser Arafat while in exile in Algiers.

Despite the 1988 proclamation, the Palestine Liberation Organization did not exercise control over any territory until the 1994 Gaza-Jericho Agreement, which gave it limited rule in the Areas A and B of the West Bank and part of the Gaza Strip.