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| Fatema Obaid, 95, says the current genocide in Gaza is worse than the 1948 Nakba (Hani Abu Rezeq/MEE) |
At 95, Fatema Obaid has endured daily Israeli bombardment, starvation and the loss of 70 family members.
Yet the Palestinian grandmother, who survived the 1948 Nakba, refused to leave Gaza City when ordered to do so by the Israeli military during the 2023 genocide.
For her, fleeing again would mark the beginning of a “crueller Nakba” - one she refuses to relive.
“In the first Nakba, it is true that hundreds of thousands lost their land, homes and villages,” Obaid told Middle East Eye.
“But in this Nakba, we have lost an entire history,” she said from an unfinished apartment in western Gaza City, where she is displaced alongside her grandchildren.
“We lost entire families, and entire generations have been destroyed for decades to come. What they could not do in 1948, they are doing now.”
Originally from Gaza City’s Shujaiya neighbourhood, Obaid was temporarily displaced during the 1948 Nakba, when Zionist militias attacked Palestinian towns and villages across historic Palestine, forcibly expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to make way for the creation of Israel - an event many scholars describe as ethnic cleansing.
Obaid later returned to Shujaiya, an area that remained outside Israeli control after the 1949 armistice agreement, but lay close to the new de facto border between Israel and the Gaza Strip.
More than 75 years later, she relived the same trauma she endured as a teenager - only this time with far greater brutality.
“There is no comparison between the first and the second Nakba,” she said.
New Nakba
Like many Palestinians in Gaza during the Nakba, Obaid experienced both displacement and giving refuge.
She and her family were forced to flee their home for several months amid the violence and chaos that swept across Palestine in 1948.
At the same time, Gaza was inundated with Palestinians forcibly expelled from towns and villages that later became part of Israel.
'Nothing is more painful than being uprooted from your own land and knowing that, after all these years, you will die in displacement'
- Fatema Obaid, Palestinian grandmother
Families arrived with almost nothing after fleeing killings, bombardment and attacks by Zionist militias, believing they would return within days. Instead, Gaza became a place of permanent refuge, overcrowded with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians uprooted during the Nakba.
Today, around 1.6 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants live in the enclave, making up roughly 73 percent of Gaza’s population.
Since October 2023, however, Obaid has been displaced more than 10 ten times after her home and entire neighbourhood were reduced to rubble and absorbed into Israel’s newly imposed no-go zone.
“I have lived in Shujaiya since I was born. Even after marrying my cousin, I moved only a few streets away,” she recalled, adding that they fled for a few months in 1948 but eventually returned.
“Only during this Nakba did we lose our homes, our neighbourhood and all of eastern Gaza,” she added.
“They bombed our house and killed more than 70 members of my family - my sons, grandchildren, nephews, their children and many others from our extended family.”
During the Nakba between 1947 and 1949, Zionist militias and later Israeli forces killed an estimated 13,000 to 15,000 Palestinians and permanently displaced around 750,000 people - roughly 75 percent of the Palestinian population at the time.
In the current genocide in Gaza, Israeli forces have killed more than 72,000 Palestinians in two years, while nearly two million residents have been displaced. Around 1.5 million remain uprooted despite the ceasefire agreement, most now living in makeshift tents.
Staying in Gaza
Shortly after Obaid was forced to flee her home for another part of Gaza City in October 2023, the Israeli military issued repeated mass expulsion orders instructing residents to move south.
As hundreds of thousands of residents initially refused to comply, Israel imposed what United Nations experts considered a systematic starvation that was “used as a savage weapon of war” to force Palestinians out.
For months that followed, residents were deprived of basic food items, including wheat flour, and struggled to find drinking water. Famine was officially declared in Gaza City in August 2025 by the UN-backed... READ MORE https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/nakba-genocide-gaza-grandmothers-lifetime-loss-and-resilience
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