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| United Nations Photo Palestine Refugees, 1951 |
The Palestinian conflict forced into exile nearly a million Arabs. Great efforts were made by the UN Relief and Works Agency to provide work and pay for the refugees. But available funds were only sufficient to provide employment for a small minority, without producing lasting economic effects.
Refugees make materials and clothes for their own use.
UN Photo
1951
Middle East
Photo # UN7707935
https://www.flickr.com/photos/un_photo/53376742762/in/album-72177720313177543/
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Palestine Refugees 1949A wagonload of refugee children in the U.N. demilitarized zone at Lake Tiberias on the Israeli-Syrian frontier. [Exact date unknown]Photo # UN7505381 |
photo & essay copyright Mike Hanini Odetalla 2026
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| Palestinian villagers who fled from their homes during fighting between Israeli and Arab troops, on November 4, 1948 [Jim Pringle/AP Photo] |
Washington, DC – It is a question that reaches a fever pitch this time of year for Palestinian survivors and rights advocates: Can the United States government create just policy in the Middle East without a full accounting — or recognition — of Palestinian history?
Thursday marks the annual day of remembrance for the Nakba, a period that began in 1948 with the mass expulsion of Palestinians and the creation of the state of Israel.
Since then, Palestinians have endured decades of displacement and ethnic cleansing.
But the US government does not recognise the Nakba, which translates to the “catastrophe” in Arabic, even as it continues to assert gargantuan influence over the region and maintains ironclad support for the Israeli government.
Under the second administration of President Donald Trump, the US has taken a further active role in Palestinian affairs, establishing the controversial “Board of Peace” to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza, even as it continues to take a permissive approach towards Israel’s genocide.
When faced with the question of whether the US can responsibly address Palestinian issues without acknowledging the Nakba, Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute, believes the answer is simple: No.
“If you only acknowledge the humanity and suffering of one side, that forces you also to ignore historical realities that are still with us today,” he told Al Jazeera.
Elgindy said “political amnesia” has long defined the US government’s approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
For decades, the US has supported Israel with billions in foreign assistance and military aid, despite the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory and a system of segregation that rights groups say constitutes apartheid.
Since October 7, 2023, Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has killed at least 75,000 Palestinians. Elgindy told Al Jazeera that the US has played a key role in underwriting the conflict.
“For better or worse, mostly for worse, the United States is inextricably tied to the Palestinian issue,” Elgindy said.
A fundamental – if long delayed – corrective step would be recognition of the Nakba, he said. “It is a historical reality that Palestinians have a collective trauma that is part of their identity and part of their political psychology.”
On Thursday, US Representative Rashida Tlaib introduced a resolution to officially recognise “the ongoing Nakba and Palestinian refugees’ rights”.
It was the fifth consecutive time she has put forward the bill, with the latest version carrying 12 co-sponsors, up from six when it was first introduced in 2022.
In a video conference this week, she explained that it was necessary to draw attention to the Nakba, given that the human rights abuses against Palestinians continue.
“Too many of my colleagues in Congress like to act like … the state violence against the Palestinian people began with [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu,” Tlaib said.
“We know that Palestinian history has been one of the ongoing Nakba and the ethnic cleansing campaign since the creation [of Israel] in 1948.”
All told, about 750,000 Palestinians were violently expelled during the Nakba, displaced to refugee camps across the West Bank, Gaza and neighbouring Arab countries.
About 400 cities and villages were depopulated, with massacres committed in Balad al-Sheikh, Saasaa, Deir Yassin, Saliha and Lydda, among others.
Like in past years, Tlaib’s latest legislative effort is largely symbolic, with little chance of progressing in Congress, which remains predominantly pro-Israel.
Still, the latest resolution comes amid signs of shifting public awareness, with polls showing increasing sympathy for Palestinians and a rise in negative views towards Israel’s government. Polls have shown tanking support for Israel, particularly among Democrats, amid the genocide in Gaza.
Attitudes in Congress have also shown significant, if more incremental, signs of change. Though support for Israel was once considered sacrosanct... READ MORE https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/15/historical-reckoning-the-push-for-the-us-to-acknowledge-the-nakba
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STOP ARMING ISRAEL!!!!!
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| Palestinian women harvest cotton in the village of Kafr Saba in 1937 (Agricultural memory of Palestine) |
For Khadija al-Azza, her home village of Tell al-Safi was a paradise.
"We lived the best of lives,” the 88-year-old Palestinian woman told Middle East Eye, recalling the small rural community of her childhood, before its population was forcibly expelled by Zionist militias in 1948 during the Nakba - Arabic for “catastrophe”.
Between 1917 and 1948, the United Kingdom occupied Palestine during what was known as the Mandate era. Small-scale farmers, known as fellahin, were central to Palestinian society at the time, with three quarters of the population living in rural areas and agriculture the main source of livelihood, bringing families together to work in the fields.
With the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the British government vowed to establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, carrying out various policies seeking to fulfill this promise - many of which came at the expense of the Palestinians.
Now, 72 years after the establishment of the state of Israel and the mass displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their lands, Nakba survivors share with Middle East Eye memories of the lives and land they lost, to which they maintain a deep attachment
At least 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes during the Nakba. They and their descendants now number more than 5.4 million scattered across the occupied West Bank, the besieged Gaza Strip and surrounding countries. Many of the villages that were forcibly evacuated were destroyed or turned into national parks by Israel, trees growing on the ruins of abandoned homes.
Living for decades in crowded refugee camps in the West Bank, the elderly survivors who MEE met spoke of their steadfast yearning to return to their former homes. Some said they still have dreams at night of working in the fields.... READ MORE https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/palestine-nakba-farmers-rural-resistance-british-mandate
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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.
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.
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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A neighborhood of Beit Lahia was destroyed in Israeli strikes in October 2024, including a strike on a building that killed 132 members of the extended Abu Naser family. |
BEIT LAHIA, Gaza Strip — An Israeli drone buzzes over a sea of debris in northern Gaza, where homes were turned into mass graves.
This is where a recovery crew has carried out one of its first missions to unearth bodies buried deep under rubble — at the site of one of the deadliest Israeli strikes of the Gaza war.
The strike destroyed a five-story apartment building in late October 2024, killing more than 132 members of the extended Abu Naser family sheltering inside, an NPR investigation documented.
"We've been dreaming every day of the moment we could recover the martyrs, honor them, and bury them," said Ola Abu Naser, a 30-year-old survivor. "Every day we felt as if they were calling us, saying: 'We are here.'"
About 8,000 bodies are believed to still be buried under debris throughout Gaza, according to Gaza's health ministry.
NPR documented the three-day recovery mission at the site of the Abu Naser family massacre.... READ MORE https://www.npr.org/2026/05/06/nx-s1-5811930/gaza-recovering-bodies
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