Palestinians mark ‘Nakba’ day amid Gaza war, humanitarian crisis

Palestinians around the Middle East held protests and other events on Wednesday to commemorate the anniversary of their mass expulsion and evacuation from what is now Israel, as concerns about the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza grew.

The Nakba, which is Arabic for “catastrophe,” refers to the 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were pushed out of what is now Israel prior to and during the 1948 War of Independence.

More than twice that amount have been displaced within Gaza since the beginning of the conflict, which was sparked by Hamas’ October 7 onslaught on Israel, in which militants killed 1,200 people and kidnapped 252.

According to UN agencies, 550,000 people, or over a quarter of Gaza’s 2.3 million population, have been displaced in the previous week as Israeli soldiers surged into the southern city of Rafah and re-entered northern Gaza.

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.

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.