Most standard definitions put 17 countries in the Middle East: 16 UN member states plus Palestine, a UN non-member observer state. The count rises to 18 if Afghanistan is included and can drop to 14 or 15 if Turkey, Cyprus and Egypt are assigned to Europe, Asia and Africa respectively. There is no treaty, no boundary commission and no international body that fixes the answer.
The Core Sixteen Everyone Agrees On
Start with the states that appear on essentially every list, grouped by subregion:
- Arabian Peninsula (7): Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait
- The Levant (4): Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan
- Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau (2): Iraq, Iran
- Contested edges, usually included (3): Turkey, Egypt, Cyprus
Adding Palestine gives 17. The extremes of the group are stark. Saudi Arabia covers about 2.15 million km², roughly 2,700 times the area of Bahrain, which at around 787 km² is smaller than New York City. Egypt is the most populous at roughly 107 million, ahead of Iran at about 89 million and Turkey at about 85 million; Bahrain and Qatar each have populations comparable to a mid-sized European city, and in Qatar and the UAE, foreign nationals outnumber citizens by a factor of roughly four to one.
Where the Disagreements Start: Egypt, Turkey, Cyprus and Afghanistan
Each borderline case fails a different test.
Egypt is geographically in Africa apart from the Sinai Peninsula, which lies in Asia. It is included in the Middle East on cultural, linguistic and political grounds: it is Arabic-speaking, a founding member of the Arab League, and central to the region's diplomacy. A strictly continental classification would exclude it.
Turkey straddles the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. About 3 per cent of its land — East Thrace, including part of Istanbul — is in Europe, and Turkey is a NATO member, an EU candidate and a participant in European sporting and cultural institutions. Some analysts treat it as European, some as Middle Eastern, and many as both.
Cyprus is geographically in Asia, about 75 km south of Turkey, but it joined the European Union in 2004 and has been politically and culturally oriented towards Greece for centuries. The island has been divided since 1974, with the north administered by a self-declared state recognised only by Turkey. Most Middle East lists include Cyprus; most European lists do too.
Afghanistan is the usual eighteenth entry. It is landlocked in Central and South Asia, shares no border with any Arab state, and is more often grouped with Pakistan and the Central Asian republics. The US State Department places it outside its Near Eastern Affairs bureau. Its inclusion generally reflects a security-policy framing rather than a geographic one.
Palestine and the Question of Statehood
Palestine is the reason a list can read 16 or 17 without either number being wrong. The United Nations General Assembly upgraded Palestine to non-member observer state status in November 2012, and it is recognised as a state by a large majority of UN members — around 145 to 150, with the exact figure shifting as further recognitions are announced. It is not a UN member state, because that requires a Security Council recommendation.
Lists built strictly from UN membership omit it. Lists built from recognised polities include it. Both conventions are in wide use, so the safest approach when the count matters — in a quiz, an exam or a dataset — is to state which convention you are applying.
Two further complications sit inside the count. Several de facto entities control territory without recognised statehood — Northern Cyprus, recognised only by Turkey; the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, an autonomous region rather than a state; and the effectively partitioned administrations in Yemen and, until recently, Syria. None of these appears in any standard country total, but they matter for anyone reading a map rather than a list. And Israel's and Palestine's boundaries are themselves disputed, so even the states that are counted do not have universally agreed edges.
What the Map Actually Looks Like
Beneath the political argument, the region has a coherent physical structure. It sits on the junction of the Arabian, African and Eurasian plates, and that collision explains most of the topography.
- The Arabian Peninsula is a tilted block, high along the Red Sea escarpment in the west — Yemen's highlands exceed 3,600 m — sloping gently east to the shallow Persian Gulf.
- The Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter, covers roughly 650,000 km² of southern Arabia and is the largest continuous sand desert on Earth.
- The Great Rift runs north through the Red Sea and the Jordan Valley. The Dead Sea shoreline, at about 430 m below sea level, is the lowest exposed land surface on the planet, and the level continues to drop by roughly a metre a year.
- The Zagros and Elburz ranges wall the Iranian plateau, with Mount Damavand reaching 5,610 m — the highest peak in the region and in all of Asia west of the Hindu Kush.
- The Anatolian plateau in Turkey is ringed by the Pontic and Taurus mountains and cut by the North Anatolian Fault, one of the world's most active strike-slip faults.
Almost the entire region falls into arid or semi-arid climate classes. Rainfall above 400 mm a year is confined to Turkey's coasts, northern Iran along the Caspian, Lebanon's mountains and the highlands of Yemen and Oman's Dhofar, which catches the Indian Ocean monsoon.
The region is also where three of the world's major religions began — Judaism, Christianity and Islam all emerged within a few hundred kilometres of the eastern Mediterranean — and where the earliest cities are found. Uruk, Eridu and Ur in southern Mesopotamia date to the fourth millennium BC, and the fertile crescent arcing from the Nile through the Levant to the Tigris and Euphrates is where wheat, barley, sheep and goats were first domesticated. That deep continuity of settlement is part of why the region resists tidy continental classification: it has functioned as a single crossroads for far longer than the continents have been named.
Oil, Water and Why the Region's Borders Are So Straight
Look at a map of Saudi Arabia's frontiers with Jordan and Iraq and the lines run for hundreds of kilometres without deviation. These are not geographic boundaries; they are drawing-board boundaries, and the drawing was done between 1916 and 1922.
The Sykes–Picot agreement of 1916 divided Ottoman Arab provinces into prospective British and French spheres. The San Remo conference of 1920 turned those spheres into League of Nations mandates. The Uqair Protocol of 1922 saw the British high commissioner Sir Percy Cox settle the Kuwait–Najd–Iraq frontiers in a single sitting, creating two neutral zones as a compromise over grazing rights. Kuwait's claim to statehood and Iraq's long-running rejection of it both trace to that meeting.
The resource picture reinforces why those lines mattered. The region holds roughly 48 per cent of the world's proven crude oil reserves, concentrated around the Persian Gulf — Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and the UAE each rank in the global top ten. Two chokepoints carry a disproportionate share of the trade: the Strait of Hormuz, about 33 km wide at its narrowest, through which roughly a fifth of global petroleum liquids consumption passes, and the Suez Canal, handling something like 12 per cent of world trade by volume.
Water is the tighter constraint. The Tigris and Euphrates both rise in eastern Turkey, which means Turkey's Southeastern Anatolia Project dams give it upstream leverage over Syria and Iraq. The Nile is governed by agreements Egypt regards as binding and upstream states do not. Gulf states have solved the problem with money and energy: Saudi Arabia and the UAE are among the largest desalination producers in the world, and several Gulf countries now draw more than half their drinking water from the sea.
MENA, the Near East and the Arab League Are Not the Same List
Much of the confusion around the count comes from four overlapping terms being used interchangeably. They are not interchangeable.
- Middle East — 17 or 18 countries, as above. A British military coinage from around 1900, popularised in the Second World War.
- MENA — Middle East and North Africa, typically 19 to 21 countries, adding Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia, and sometimes Mauritania and Sudan. Standard in economics and development work.
- Arab League — 22 member states, a political body rather than a region. It includes Comoros, Djibouti, Somalia and Mauritania, and excludes Iran, Israel, Turkey and Cyprus. Syria's membership was suspended in 2011 and restored in May 2023. See the full Arab League membership list.
- Gulf Cooperation Council — six states: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Iraq, Iran and Yemen all border the Gulf and are not members.
- Near East — an older, largely archaeological and diplomatic term, roughly the Middle East minus Iran and Afghanistan.
Note what falls out of this: Iran, Israel and Turkey are Middle Eastern but not Arab, while Morocco and Somalia are Arab but not Middle Eastern. "Arab world" and "Middle East" are different sets that happen to overlap heavily.
Counting the Region for a Quiz
If you need one defensible number, use 17: the 16 UN member states listed above plus Palestine. State the convention, note that Afghanistan is sometimes added and that Cyprus, Turkey and Egypt are transcontinental, and the answer will hold up to scrutiny. Vagueness about the criteria, not the count itself, is what makes this question look harder than it is.
The same ambiguity affects neighbouring regions, and it is worth seeing how the argument plays out on a larger scale in our breakdown of how many countries are in Asia, or dig into the physical setting in our guide to the geography of the Arabian Peninsula.