Palestinians will mark the 76th anniversary of their mass expulsion from what is now Israel, an event that is at the heart of their national struggle. But in many ways, this experience pales in comparison to the calamity currently unfolding in Gaza.
The Palestinians call this anniversary, which they will celebrate on Wednesday, the “Nakba”, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic. Some 700,000 Palestinians, the majority of the pre-war population, fled or were driven from their homes before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War that followed the creation of Israel.
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 today numbers some six million people, most living in slum-like urban refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the occupied West Bank. by Israel.
In the Gaza Strip, refugees and their descendants make up around three-quarters of the population.
Israel’s rejection of what Palestinians see as their right of return is one of the conflict’s main grievances and one of the thorniest issues in the failed peace talks 15 years ago.
Today, many Palestinians fear a repeat of their painful history on an even more cataclysmic scale.
Across Gaza, Palestinians in recent days have loaded cars and donkey carts or marched on foot toward already overcrowded tent camps as Israel again expands its offensive.
The war on Gaza has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities, making it by far the deadliest round of fighting in the history of the long conflict.
Around 1.7 million Palestinians, three-quarters of the besieged enclave’s population, have been forced to flee their homes, many on multiple occasions. This is well more than double the number of people who fled before and during the 1948 war.
Even if Palestinians are not expelled en masse from Gaza, many fear that they will never be able to return home or that the destruction caused in the territory will make life there impossible. According to a recent United Nations estimate, it would be necessary to wait until 2040 to rebuild the destroyed houses in the enclave.
Israel unleashed one of the deadliest and most destructive military campaigns in recent history in Gaza, dropping 900 kg (2,000 pounds) bombs on densely populated areas. Entire neighborhoods have been reduced to wastelands of rubble and plowed roads, many of which are littered with unexploded bombs.
The World Bank estimates that $18.5 billion in damage was inflicted, roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of the entire Palestinian territory in 2022. And that was in January, when ground operations began devastating attacks on Israel in Khan Younis and before the military intervention. went to Rafah.
