ALBAWABA - Every year on May 15, Palestinians commemorate the day they were forced out of their homeland, in what’s known as Nakba, described as one of Arab modern history's most tragic ethnic cleansing crimes.
The word Nakba in Arabic comes from the word catastrophe. It describes the process of ethnically cleansing the indigenous people of Palestine out of their homes and giving them to Jewish people coming from various parts of the world.
Ola Awad, President of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), said today, marking 75 years since the Nakba, the number of Palestinians worldwide has doubled about 10 times, according to WAFA news agency.
With about 1.4 million Palestinians living across 1300 villages, the Nakba resulted in the displacement of over 900,000 people. The vast majority of them ended up in neighboring countries; Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
As of 1914, the population of the Palestinian land was about 690,000 people, 8 percent of them were Jews. Fast forward to 1948, the population exceeded 1 million, with a percentage of 31.5 percent of them being Jews.
Jewish immigration to Palestine started as early as the 1930s, with about 225 thousand Jewish people immigrating from different parts of the world between the years 1932 and 1939. With hundreds of thousands of Jewish people pouring into Palestine, as of the year 1947, more than 318 thousand Jews have immigrated to Palestinian lands.
Historically documented, as the Nakba occurred, more than 770 villages were seized by the Israeli forces and 531 villages were destroyed, driving hundreds of thousands out of their homes. In addition to 51 massacres committed by the Israeli forces, leaving 15+ thousand Palestinians killed.
In 2022, the number of Palestinians across the world exceeded 14 million. According to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, the population of Israel is nearing the 10 million mark.
According to statistical reports by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the number of registered refugees was about 6.4 million, around 2 million of whom live between Gaza and the West Bank.
About 28 percent of Palestinians who were displaced live across 58 refugee camps; 31 outside of Palestine (10 in Jordan, 9 in Syria as well as 12 in Lebanon), and 27 camps on Palestinian territories (19 in the West Bank and 8 in the Gaza Strip).
The number of Arabs and Palestinians killed since the Nakba has exceeded 100,000. The year 2014 is believed to be the harshest year of Palestinians, with 2,240 killed, 2,181 of those killed during the Israeli aggression on Gaza.
Through the years, Israeli forces had committed a number of massacres in a number of Palestinian villages and refugee camps. Starting as early as 1948, weeks before the Nakba, Zionist militias Irgun and Stern Gan tore through the village of Deir Yassin killing at least 107 Palestinians and expelling whoever left alive from their homes.
The Israeli aggression against Palestinians did not stop at the borders of Palestinian Lands. One of the massacres that Palestinians will always remember would be the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon in 1982. The Phalange militia invaded the Sabra and Shatila camp killing between 2,000-3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians in a 43-hour killing spree.
75 years later, the Nakba did not only alter the course of events of the lives of those who were displaced from their homes back in 1948, but also changed the lives of the following generations who did not live through the Nakba, but remained waiting for the day where they would live to see their homeland.
Written by: Batool Darweesh
