Palestinians on Wednesday mark the 76th year of their mass expulsion from lands now occupied by Israel, an event that in many ways, is very similar to calamity now unfolding in Gaza.
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After the war, Israel refused to allow Palestinians 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 6 million, with most living in slum-like urban refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
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.
About 1.7 million Palestinians, three-quarters of the besieged enclave’s population, have been forced to flee their homes, most of them multiple times. That is well more than twice the number that fled before and during the 1948 war.
Far-right Israeli ministers call for the reoccupation of Gaza and "voluntary migration" as Palestinian marks the 76th anniversary of "Nakba" – Arabic for "catastrophe" – when 750,000 people were forcibly evicted from their homes or fled rampaging Jewish militias.
After 220 days of war, the Israeli military engaged in a ground invasion of Rafah. At least 35,173 people have been killed and 79,061 wounded in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7.
At least 82 Palestinians have been killed in the past 24 hours, the highest death toll in a single day in many weeks, during relentless Israeli air attacks.
More than 450,000 Palestinians have now fled Rafah city with another 100,000 evacuating the north as Israel’s military launches new attacks.
The Israeli military has ordered more residents to evacuate large parts of northern Gaza, where battles between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters are raging months after Israel claimed it had defeated Hamas there.
In Rafah, which borders Egypt in the south, Palestinian residents said they could see smoke billowing above the city’s eastern districts amid the sound of explosions.
Thousands of flag-waving Palestinians marched in northern Israel on Tuesday to commemorate the flight and forced flight of Palestinians during the 1948 war surrounding Israel's creation, and to demand the right of refugees to return.
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", or "catastrophe", when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven out during the 1948 war that accompanied Israel's creation.
