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On May 15th Palestinians and their allies around the world mark the anniversary of their disposssession, the Nakba ( literally “disaster” or “catastrophe” in Arabic) a poignant reminder of the forced displacement in 1948 of more than 750,000 Palestinians, about half of the Arab population in Palestine at that time,
The 1948 founding of Israel was founded with the Nakba, a series of atrocities that ethnically cleansed Palestinians from their homeland.Israel was established by means of brutal massacres (Deir Yassin, Kafr Qasim, Tantura, etc.), through ethnic cleansing, and an attempt to erase Palestinians both from their land and global collective memory.. Palestinians were forced out of their homes and lands and saw Palestinian villages wiped off the map in places like Yassin, Lydda and Tantura by the hands of Zionist para-military groups like Ergun, the Stern Gang and Haganah, that later formed the core of the Israeli Defense Force.
Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the establishment of the Palestine Mandate, the British colonial power began implementing its plan of creating a Jewish state on Palestinian land. At the same time, the Zionist movement was lobbying Western powers to support the mass migration of Jews to Palestine and recognize a Jewish claim to the land. In 1917, the Balfour Declaration declared British support for a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, and that's how the Day of Nakba officially began.
The notorious declaration was made in a letter written by Britain's then-Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour, to Baron Rothschild, a leader of the British Zionist movement. The letter was endorsed by Britain's then-Prime Minister David Lloyd George..The letter stated the British would "use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object". For Zionists, this was a clear victory.
The vast majority of Palestinian refugees, both those outside the 1949 armistice lines and those internally displaced, were barred by the newly declared state of Israel from their right to return to their homes or the reclaiming of their property, and in doing so Israel violated international law. It is the defining event that formed and solidified the Palestinian liberation struggle.
To understand the Nakba is to first confront its sheer scale and totality. Before the Nakba there was a large, deeply rooted, and essentially ancient Arab society in most of what, within a few months, became the Jewish state of Israel. In effect, one day it was there, as it had been for living memory, and the next day it was gone. An entire society, with the exception of relatively small groups in a few places, simply vanished.
After World War I, the League of Nations broke the Ottoman Empire up into territories assigned to different colonial powers. The lands that today constitute Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories were placed under British rule, but with two explicit and incompatible purposes: Britain was already committed to supporting the recently established Zionist movement that sought to create “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.
Then in Britain came the notorious 1917 Balfour Declaration and the Palestine mandate, in which the overwhelming Palestinian majority was simply referred to as “existing non-Jewish communities,” with “civil and religious rights,” but not political ones.
With the Balfour Declaration, the government of the time was seeking Jewish support for its war efforts, and the Zionist push for a homeland for Jews, which was becoming an emerging political force. In 1917, Jews constituted 10% of the population, the rest were Arabs. Yet Britain recognised the national rights of a tiny minority and denied it to the majority This was a classic colonial document which totally disregarded the rights and aspirations of the indigenous population. In the words of Jewish writer Arthur Koestler: “One nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.”
It was a shock to the Arab world, which had not been consulted and had received promises of independence of its own in the post-war break up of the defeated Ottoman Empire. The Palestinians have always condemned the declaration, which they refer to as the "Balfour promise" saying Britain was giving away land it did not own.
The Balfour Declaration constituted a dangerous historical precedent and a blatant breach of all international laws and norms, and this act of the British Empire to “give” the land of another people for colonial settlement created the conditions for countless atrocities against the Palestinian people. Balfour, in a 1919 confidential memo, wrote:
“Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age old traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far greater import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land”
The discriminatory language used by Sir Arthur Balfour and seen in the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate reveal the prejudiced rational behind British foreign policy in Palestine. A month after the Balfour Declaration on 2 December 1917, the British army occupied Jerusalem. In 1923, the British Mandate for Palestine came into effect, and included the entire text of the Balfour Declaration. Through the Mandate, Britain would go on to rule Palestine for three decades.
As a result of all of this the Palestinian people were denied the right to independence and statehood, and were treated as refugees in their own land. The Nakba resulted in the destruction of much of Palestinian society and much of the Arab landscape was obliterated by the Zionist state. And in the post 1948 period the Palestinians became second class citizens, subject to a system of military occupation by a government that confiscated the bulk of their lands.
Even the word 'Nakba' was banned by the Israeli Minister of Education in 2009, and was removed from school textbooks. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayah said at the time that the word was tantamount to spreading propoganda against Israel. But the word Nakba is the term that about a fifth of Israel's population, the Palestinians use to describe this day.
The influx of Zionists to Palestine, supported by the British, was however was met with fierce Palestinian resistance and is very important to note that the Palestinian leadership in Al-Quds at the time insisted on continuing negotiations with the British to resolve the simmering tensions, Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam, a Syrian leader living in Haifa since 1922, began calling for resistance against the British and the Zionists. In 1935, Al-Qassam was surrounded by British forces and killed along with some of his men. His resistance inspired many Palestinians.
By 1936, an Arab resistance erupted against British imperialism and Zionist settler colonialism and by 1939, the Palestinians found themselves fighting two enemies: British colonial forces and Zionist militia groups.
And although the British had backed mass Jewish immigration to Palestine, the colonial power began to limit the number of Jews arriving in the country in an attempt to quell Arab unrest.This new limit on immigration upset the Zionists and they launched a series of terrorist attacks on British authorities to drive them out, while at the same time the Zionists continued to further advance their dream of creating a Jewish state on Palestinian land.
After the war, Israel refused to allow them the right to return because it says 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.
The Zionist strategy of expelling Palestinians from their land was a slow and deliberate process. According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, Zionist leaders and military commanders met regularly from March 1947 to March 1948, when they finalized plans to ethnically cleanse Palestine. As Zionist attacks on the British and Arabs escalated, the British decided to hand over their responsibility for Palestine to the newly founded United Nations.
In November 1947, the UN General Assembly proposed a plan to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab one. Jews in Palestine only constituted one-third of the population - most of whom had arrived from Europe a few years earlier - and only retained control of less than 5.5 percent of historic Palestine. Yet under the UN proposal, they were allocated 55 percent of the land. The Palestinians and their Arab allies rejected the proposal. The Zionist message was simple: Leave the land or be killed. The Zionist movement accepted all this on the grounds that it legitimized the idea of a Jewish state on Arab land. But they did not agree to the proposed borders and campaigned to conquer even more of historic Palestine.
As the date (May 14, 1948) selected by the British for their Palestine Mandate to expire approached, Zionist forces hastened their efforts to seize Palestinian land. In April 1948, the Zionists captured Haifa, one of the biggest Palestinian cities, and subsequently set their eyes on Jaffa. On the same day, British forces formally withdrew, and David Ben-Gurion, then-head of the Zionist Agency, proclaimed the establishment of the state of Israel. Overnight, the Palestinians became stateless. The world’s two great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, immediately recognized Israel.
As the Zionists continued their ethnic cleansing campaign against the Palestinians, war broke out between neighboring Arab countries and the new Zionist state. The UN appointed Swedish diplomat, Folke Bernadotte, as its mediator in Palestine. He recognized the plight of the Palestinians and attempted to address their suffering. His efforts to bring about a peaceful solution and halt to the ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign ended when he was assassinated by the Zionists in September 1948.
Nevertheless the UN continued to push for an armistice deal between Israel and those Arab countries. Bernadotte was replaced by his American deputy, Ralph Bunche. Negotiations led by Bunche between Israel and the Arab states resulted in the latter conceding even more Palestinian land to the newly founded Zionist state. In May 1949, Israel was admitted to the UN, and its grip over 78 percent of historic Palestine was consolidated. The remaining 22 percent became known as the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
While the Nakba represented a catastrophic historic event in the collective consciousness of the Palestinian people, it was followed only 19 years later by another horrific war which resulted in the displacement of a quarter to one third of the Palestinian population and the beginning of a new era in which the whole of it got to live under a complex Israeli regime.
This additional event got to be known as “the Naksa”, which can be translated as a serious quick escalation of an earlier catastrophe. The Naksa happened in and after a war that took only six days between Israel on the one hand, and a number of Arab countries surrounding, resulting in a relatively easy victory of Israel and the occupation of territories that were under the sovereignty or administration of its neighbouring states.
Although the hostilities of the war itself were quick and not that widespread, the displaced persons from the occupied Palestinian Territory were hundreds of thousands. In other words, the number of Palestinians displaced in that war was out of proportion. This can be understood only by explaining the ideological background that has, since the Nakba, been informing military, legislative and administrative Israeli operations.
When the war took place in 1967, Zionist leaders saw this as an opportunity to make some demographic changes in the occupied territory as a whole and in certain areas in particular. During and immediately after the war, some quarter a million to 420,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes.in a continiation of Israels policy of etnic cleansing that started with the Nabka,
The Nabka is given almost no attention in history books or by the mainstream news media but is essential in understanding the ongoing violence in Israel-Palestine and the Middle East in general. Events like this are at the core of the Palestinan peoples national struggle. But in many ways, that experience pales in comparison to the calamity now unfolding in Gaza.
The Nakba, is ongoing to this day, as millions of Palestinians continue to be starved in Gaza, while thousands more are massacred and displaced from Gaza to the West Bank in Israel's ongoing genocide.
Over the past 77 years, the Palestinian people have continued to be oppressed and dispossessed, with over 7 million Palestinians living as refugees or exiles, who are still denied the right to return to the land from which they, or their family, were forcibly expelled. A right which is enshrined in international law.
The Nakba continues every day as Palestinians are evicted from their homes in East Jerusalem and the West Bank to be replaced by illegal Jewish-only settlements. It continues as Israel’s occupation obstructs and severely restricts Palestinians’ attainment of rights and fundamental freedoms, including: the right to life, the right to liberty and security of person, and their right to an adequate standard of living.
The crimes that were committed in 1948 draw haunting parallels to the action that Israeli forces have been committing in Palestine in since October 7, 2023. Today we are witnessing Israel engage in ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza on an even larger, more violent scale. The Palestinians are facing what Israeli leaders openly call the “Gaza Nakba”an unprecedented genocide of extermination and forced displacement against Palestinians in Gaza.
In the aftermath of October 7th, a second Nakba has been unfolding in Gaza before our eyes, with over 35,000 Palestinians killed. Of the 2.2 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, 1.9 million people have been forcibly displaced and many of their homes have been destroyed by Israel's brutal attacks.That is well over twice the number that fled before and during the 1948 war.
The collapse of the truce with Israel’s resumption of attacks on 18 March 2025, which have killed at least 2,325 people, including 820 children, shattered any semblance of hope for Palestinians in Gaza. In addition to blocking entry of all aid, Israel’s decision to cut power to Gaza’s main desalination plant on 9 March 2025 has further crippled access to clean water. The plant was the only facility in Gaza reconnected to Israel’s electricity grid in November 2024, after a full electricity blackout had been imposed since 11 October 2023.
The fact that members of the Israeli government are calling their assault Gaza 'the new Nabka' tells you all you need to know about their intended endgame. It's genocide.Nakba is not history. Nakba is the present. Forcibly starving and annihilating 2 millions Palestinian people is Nakba.. It’s a wound that bleeds every day.
Israel’s 18 months of bombardment on Gaza has killed 18,000 children and damaged and destroyed more than 90 per cent of all homes in the Gaza Strip. Starved and under siege, no food, water, fuel or humanitarian aid has entered Gaza for a third month.
The Israeli Security Minister has stated that Gaza will soon be “completely destroyed” and emptied of the millions of Palestinians still living there. Israel is not only destroying the lives and livelihoods of Palestinians, but their futures too.
On May 5, 2025, the Israeli security cabinet approved a plan to escalate military operations in Gaza, seize more territory, and cement long-term control. As images of emaciated children flood the media amid an ever-deepening humanitarian crisis, Israel declared its intent to make its occupation of Gaza permanent.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described a mission to “conquer all of Gaza.” The plan outlines large-scale forced displacement, funnelling Gaza’s 2.3 million residents into the already devastated southern corridor between Khan Younis and Rafah, regions torn apart by relentless aerial bombardment. Mainstream Israeli society has increasingly embraced decades of far-right rhetoric. “Occupation” is no longer a word many shy away from. Israel’s decision to permanently occupy Gaza is a brutal continuation of history.
Today, Israel has demolished homes, destroyed nearly every hospital, and erased universities from the map. Agricultural fields are flattened, while schools and churches are in ruins. Over the last 19 months, the death toll exceeds 55,000 Palestinians. The final count will likely surpass 200,000 once the bodies under the rubble are uncovered.
The Nakba is not merely history; it is an ongoing system perpetuated through war, siege, and displacement. A colonial blueprint reaffirmed after October 7, 2023, a leaked Israeli intelligence memo exposed the “Sinai option”,a plan to expel Palestinians into Egypt. Though presented as a contingency, it echoes a long-standing objective: to remove Palestinians and prevent their return, continuing the ethnic cleansing that began in 1948.
The plan gained traction in January 2025, when Donald Trump, newly re-elected, publicly endorsed the forced relocation of Palestinians to Egypt or Jordan and re-authorized shipments of 2,000-pound bombs.
Israel’s objective to “conquer all of Gaza” is part of a broader displacement strategy, from East Jerusalem to the West Bank and now Gaza,pushed by both far-right settlers and state forces.
The Nakba was never a single moment,it is a system that still displaces, erases, and confines the Palestninian people. Every demolished home, every village cut off by walls, every child growing up under siege is part of that ongoing catastrophe.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has made it clear that Israel will not return seized land in Gaza. Speaking in the West Bank, he declared that Gaza “will be entirely destroyed” and predicted mass civilian departure to third countries, expressing hope for annexation under the current government.
U.S. influence is unmistakable, given President Donald Trump’s expected Middle East visit. Washington and Tel Aviv are pushing for a U.S.-led provisional government to oversee Gaza post-war, excluding both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.
The U.S. plan mirrors the logic of the British Mandate: denying Palestinian sovereignty while enabling foreign control and displacement. Under the Mandate (1920–1948), Britain administered Palestine, claiming to prepare it for self-rule while facilitating Zionist expansion. This colonial framework armed and protected Zionist militias, which would form the Israeli army and execute Plan Dalet in 1948, forcibly depopulating Palestinian towns.
The logic remains unchanged: sovereignty denied, displacement renewed, and the Nakba carried forward. Mass starvation as policy Even as bulldozers reshape Gaza, the blockade tightens around the territory’s throat, a coordinated policy of starvation designed to complete what bombs and bullets began.
Since March 2, 2025, Israel has barred all supplies, including food, water, and medicine, from entering Gaza. This blockade coincides with ongoing aerial bombardments. Mass starvation looms. Aid trucks sit idle, unable to enter. Survivors of bombings are succumbing to hunger and thirst. Children,already the majority of the dead,are the primary victims of the famine.
The Red Cross has warned of a collapsing humanitarian response, and the World Food Programme has run out of supplies. UN experts stress that Israel is using famine as a weapon of war. “Safe zones” bombed, burned, and abandoned.
As of May 2025, Israeli forces have repeatedly struck areas in Gaza labeled as “safe zones” for displaced civilians. Despite their designation, places like Al-Mawasi and UN-run schools have been bombed repeatedly.
Gaza authorities report over 230 attacks on shelters, including a May 6 airstrike on a school in Al Bureij that killed at least 30 people. In Al-Mawasi alone, over 217 Palestinians have died in similar strikes since May 2024. In late 2024, a missile hit a shelter in Rafah, killing over 50 people, primarily women and children. The blast set tents ablaze, trapping victims in fire and smoke. The images, burned shelters, charred bodies, silent screams, left an indelible scar on global consciousness.
These are not isolated incidents. They reflect a deadly pattern: civilians are told to flee to “safe zones,” only to be carpet-bombed where they run. Residents of Gaza have been repeatedly forced to flee their homes under duress, losing their homes and becoming homeless in tents and schools, trapped between walls of poverty and war. Out of approximately 2.2 million Palestinians who lived in Gaza Strip on the eve of the Israeli occupation aggression, about two million have been displaced from their homes; however, they have not been spared the bombardment.
Right now, Israel is escalating its genocidal assault against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip - deliberately blocking food, medicine, and aid on the Gaza Strip. More than 2 million Palestinians in Gaza Strip are at risk of starvation, including more than 1 million children of all ages who suffer from daily hunger, about 57 children died to famine and about 65 thousand people have suffered from severe malnutrition and have been transferred to the remaining yet destroyed hospitals and medical centers in Gaza Strip.
Due to the extensive damage incurred by the water and sanitation sector, water supply rates have declined to an average of 3-5 liters per person per day, varying significantly according to geographic location, water supply, damage to infrastructure, and ongoing displacement.
More than 70% of the housing units in Gaza Strip are uninhabitable. Since the Israeli occupation aggression against Gaza Strip on October 7th, 2023, the Israeli occupation has destroyed more than 68.9 thousand buildings, more than 110 thousand severely damaged buildings, while data show that the number of housing units that have been completely or partially destroyed is estimated to be more than 330 thousand, constituting more than 70% of the total number of housing units in Gaza Strip, in addition to the destruction of schools, universities, hospitals, mosques, churches, and government headquarters, as well as the destruction of thousands of economic establishments and most of the agricultural areas, making Gaza Strip an uninhabitable place to survive.
The Nakba, while a symbol of loss, remains a beacon for future generations who continue to pursue liberation and the dream of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. While Nakba Day reminds us that 77 years on from their expulsion, human rights violations, oppression, domination and displacement of Palestinians is still ongoing.
The catastrophe of the Nakba and its consequences continue to this day. Too many generations have been born into displacement, kept from their land by institutions of apartheid, ideologies of annihilation, military backing from Western powers, corporate complicity, and media distortion. But none of this has quashed the resistance of Palestinians or the resolve of people of conscience who support them.
From campuses to city councils, from the streets to the largest trade unions, a global wave of solidarity is rising. Millions of justice activists, artists, workers, students, farmers, and human rights defenders are standing up for Palestinian liberation worldwide. The Palestinian-led BDS movement is reshaping how the world relates to Israel: not as a normal state, but as a regime of genocide and apartheid that must be dismantled to achieve freedom, justice and equality.
Today let’s send a strong message of solidarity to Palestine and the Palestinian people suffering! We cannot be silent in the face of an ongoing genocide, or the constant violation of Palestinian human rights and international law. And we must .vehemently reject Israel’s proposal of forced displacement. Any attempt to weaponise humanitarian aid, coerce displacement, or create discriminatory aid zones is a gross violation of international law and must be instantly halted. We must move from mere words to concrete actions.
The UK Government has repeatedly ignored its legal obligation to prevent and punish genocide, hypocritically claiming to be a champion of the ‘rule of law’ whilst enabling Israel to enforce its apartheid regime and systemically deny the humanity of all Palestinians. It’s beyond disappointing, it's disgusting.
Lets keep calling for a permanent ceasefire, stand with Palestine struggling for freedom, justice, equality and return and call for an end to the occupation. Pressure our government to impose immediate unilateral and multilateral lawful sanctions against Israel, starting with a military-security embargo, as called for by the UN Human Rights Council and dozens of UN human rights experts, and the end to the blockade to ensure the safe access of aid and humanitarian agencies. We must further call for our Government to implement a full arms embargo with Israel until such time as these conditions prevail.
Every day of impunity granted to apartheid Israel brings further devastating consequences to Indigenous Palestinians and to what’s left of international law’s credibility. On the 77th Anniversary of the Nakba we musr reaffirm the eternal truth Palestine was, and remains, the land of one people, the Palestinian people Despite the pain, displacement,and decades of struggle, Today is a day for justice and liberation.for us to reimagine a future where Palestinans live in peace and dignity. From the rivers to the sea, Free Palestine!
