Thursday, March 26, 2015

The Nabka: The Year of the Catastrophe

The Nabka: The Year of the Catastrophe

Nakba Day (meaning "Day of the Catastrophe") is generally commemorated on 15 May, the day after the date of Israeli independence. For the Palestinians it is an annual day of commemoration of the displacement that preceded and followed the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948.

During the 1948 Palestine War, an estimated 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled, and hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were depopulated and destroyed.

These refugees and their descendants number several million people today, divided between Jordan (2 million), Lebanon (427,057), Syria (477,700), the West Bank (788,108), and the Gaza Strip (1.1 million), with at least another quarter of a million internally displaced Palestinians in Israel.

The displacement, dispossession, and dispersal of the Palestinian people is known to them as an-Nakba, meaning "catastrophe" or "disaster.”

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