Palestinians mark ‘Nakba’ day amid Gaza war and humanitarian crisis
UN agencies say 550,000 Gazans have been displaced in last week alone amid Israeli operation in Rafah
Palestinians across the Middle East on Wednesday marked the anniversary of their mass expulsion and exodus from what is now Israel with protests and other events across the region at a time of mounting concern over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
The Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” refers to the 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were driven out of what is now Israel before and during the War of Independence in 1948, after the UN-proposed division of mandatory Palestine was rejected by Arabs in Palestine and Arab states.
More than twice that number have been displaced within Gaza since the start of the war that was triggered by Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, in which terrorists killed some 1,200 people and kidnapped 252. UN agencies say 550,000 people, nearly a quarter of Gaza’s 2.3 million people, have been newly displaced in just the last week, as Israeli forces pushed into the southern city of Rafah and reinvaded parts of northern Gaza.
“We lived through the Nakba not just once, but several times,” said Umm Shadi Sheikh Khalil, who was displaced from Gaza City and now lives in a tent in the central Gaza town of Deir al-Balah.
The refugees from 1948 and their descendants number some 6 million and live in built-up refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the West Bank. In Gaza, they are the majority of the population, with most families having relocated from what is now central and southern Israel.
Painful memories
The refugee camps in Gaza have seen some of the heaviest fighting of the war. In other camps across the region, the fighting has revived painful memories from earlier rounds of violence in a decades-old conflict with no end in sight.
At a center for elderly residents of the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, Amina Taher recalled the day her family’s house in the village of Deir al-Qassi, in what is now northern Israel, collapsed over their heads after being shelled by Israeli forces in 1948. The house was next to a school that was being used as a base by Palestinian fighters, she said.
Taher, then 3 years old, was pulled from the rubble unharmed, but her 1-year-old sister was killed. Now, she said, she has seen the same scenes play out in news coverage of Gaza.
“When I would watch the news, I had a mental breakdown because then I remembered when the house fell on me,” she said. “What harm did these children do to get killed like this?”
Daoud Nasser, also now living in Shatila, was 6 years old when his family fled from the village of Balad al-Sheikh, near Haifa. His father tried to return to their village in the early years after 1948, when the border was relatively porous, but found a Jewish family living in their house, he said.
Nasser said he would attempt the same journey if the border were not so heavily guarded. “I would run. I’m ready to walk from here to there and sleep under the olive trees on my own land,” he said.
