The 1993 Declaration of Principles, known as the Oslo Accords, established an "interim period" not to exceed five years between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), the umbrella organization for Palestinian nationalist movements. The agreement explicitly set May 1999 as the deadline for a final-status accord that would address Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees, Israeli settlements and borders. No such permanent agreement was reached.
According to analysis of the text, the accords contained structural tensions from the outset. The word "state" does not appear in the agreements themselves, despite international expectations and diplomatic framing that presented the process as a path toward Palestinian statehood. The accords substituted explicit language about sovereign independence with vaguer formulations.
