Day of the disaster
Palestinians commemorate Nakba Day
Arab refugees walk with their children and belongings along a dusty road from Jerusalem to Lebanon on November 9, 1948. The founding of the state of Israel in 1948 was associated with displacement and the loss of home for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. photo
© Jim Pringle/AP/dpa
The founding of the state of Israel in 1948 was associated with displacement and the loss of home for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Today they commemorated the “Day of Catastrophe” (Nakba).
In the shadow of the Gaza war, Palestinian demonstrators in the West Bank on Wednesday commemorated the flight and displacement of more than 700,000 Palestinians during the first Middle East war in 1948. The Palestinians celebrate the so-called Nakba Day (Day of… Catastrophe) every year on May 15th, one day after the anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel on May 14th, 1948. In the West Bank, the central event took place in Ramallah. At midday, sirens wailed there for 76 seconds – one second for every year since the Nakba.
Supporters of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Fatah movement in particular marched in the streets. According to reports from eyewitnesses, there were significantly fewer participants at the main event in Ramallah than in previous years.
Clashes at Jewish settlement
North of Ramallah, young demonstrators and Israeli soldiers clashed near a Jewish settlement. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, one young man was killed and another was arrested. This means that 170 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the beginning of the year and 476 since October 7th. There was initially no information about the incident from the Israeli army.
According to the UN, the number of Palestinian refugees and their descendants has now grown to around six million. The refugee problem, along with the dispute over the future status of Jerusalem, is one of the most complicated questions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
According to the Palestinian Statistics Office, there are more than 14 million Palestinians worldwide. Around half of them live in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and Israel. Around 20 percent of Israel’s almost ten million inhabitants are Arabs.