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GAZA: Palestinians today commemorated the 76th anniversary of “Nakba”, Arabic for “catastrophe” when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to mass expulsion from what is now Israel during the 1948 war. But in many ways, that experience pales in comparison to the calamity now unfolding in Gaza.
Palestinians marched in northern Israel on Tuesday to commemorate the flight and forced flight of Palestinians during the 1948 war, an event that is at the core of their national struggle.
Many of the about 3,000 people also called for an end to the war in Gaza as they took part in the march near the city of Haifa marking the Nakba.
Some 700,000 Palestinians, a majority of the pre-war population, fled or were driven from their homes before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that followed Israel’s establishment.
READ MORE: Hamas accepts Gaza ceasefire proposal from Egypt, Qatar
After the war, Israel refused to allow them to return because it would have resulted in a Palestinian majority within its borders. Instead, they became a seemingly permanent refugee community that now numbers some six million, with most living in slum-like urban refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
In the Gaza Strip, the refugees and their descendants make up about three-quarters of the population. Israel’s rejection of what Palestinians say is their right to return has been a core grievance in the conflict and was one of the thorniest issues in peace talks that last collapsed 15 years ago.
Now, many Palestinians fear a repeat of their painful history on an even more cataclysmic scale. All across Gaza, Palestinians in recent days have been loading up cars and donkey carts or setting out on foot to already overcrowded tent camps as Israel expands its offensive once again.
The war on Gaza has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health officials, making it by far the deadliest round of fighting in the history of the long conflict.
The World Bank estimates that $18.5bn in damage has been inflicted, roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of the entire Palestinian territory in 2022. And that was in January, in the early days of Israel’s devastating ground operations in Khan Younis and before its military went into Rafah.
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