Millions of Palestinians on May 15 marked the 78th anniversary of the Nakba — the Arabic term for 'catastrophe' — referring to the forced displacement and flight of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes during the 1948 war that accompanied the creation of the state of Israel.
This is the third Nakba commemoration since Israel launched its devastating war in Gaza. More than two million people in the besieged territory remain displaced, crammed into a fraction of the area. Six months after a ceasefire deal in October, Gaza’s population is squeezed into less than half of the 40-km strip along the Mediterranean, surrounded by areas under Israeli control.
The Nakba originated in the period 1947–1949, when Zionist paramilitary groups seized towns and villages in the land that became Israel. Historians estimate about 750,000 Palestinians — a third of the population at the time — were forced from their homes, and more than 400 villages and neighborhoods were demolished or erased to make way for new Jewish immigrants.
Hundreds of thousands of those people and their descendants now live in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Many still keep keys and property deeds to lands in present-day Israel, passed down through generations as symbols of loss and hope for return. Palestinian refugees continue to demand the right to return to the towns and villages they or their families were forced to leave.
That right of return, enshrined in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194, remains one of the core unresolved issues in long-running Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. For many Palestinians, the ongoing war in Gaza and the new wave of displacement only reinforce the belief that the Nakba is not a single historical event but an ongoing process of dispossession.
On the 78th anniversary, activists and survivors assert the commemoration is both an act of remembering the past and a renewal of demands for justice, return and self-determination.
