A second Nakba

Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip have been forced to choose between a new “Nakba”, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic and refers to the forced displacement of Palestinians, and genocide due to the nonstop and systematic Israeli annihilation of all civilians in the besieged enclave.

Over the past few days, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to move on foot from the north for five hours to the south, which borders Egypt’s Sinai, fleeing Israel's bombardment of Gaza. Scenes of this mass displacement reminded the whole world of the 1948 Nakba when the Israeli occupation forced about 750,000 Palestinians to leave their homes and destroyed their culture and society after the Zionist entity established its state.

Since October 7, Israel has shelled Gaza with more than 23,000 tons of explosives, killed more than 11,000 civilians (73% of them are children and women), and asked the residents to leave for the south under the pretext of “eliminating” the Palestinian residence fighters of Hamas, who took about 250 Israeli captives.

Full of sorrow and sadness, social media users shared scenes of Palestinians fleeing the Israeli shelling, while others posted photos of elderly Palestinians who witnessed both Nakbas (1948 and 2023), like 90-year-old Inaam, who is older than the state of Israel.

Nakba continues, but this time it’s not in black and white. pic.twitter.com/e7BWhtK5sN

— Muhammad Smiry 🇵🇸 (@MuhammadSmiry) November 10, 2023

Nakba, 1948–2023.

Once again, “the civilised world” stood with and armed the land-grabbing infanticidal terrorists, while the rest of us watched on, helplessly. 

pic.twitter.com/7cL3XYc8Jk

— John Gibbons (@think_or_swim) November 11, 2023

Others posted photos of a mother dragging two baby carts with her sons for five hours along 14 kilometers.

#النزوح #التهجير #النكبة_الثانية pic.twitter.com/eBj1CvZ2ul

— خديجة بن قنة khadija Benganna (@Benguennak) November 10, 2023

NAKBA 2023 - The story explained.
⁣⁣
“imagine being a refugee in your own country” 

The 1948 Nakba (Palestinian forced displacement from our homeland) never ended. It is ongoing. ⁣⁣
⁣⁣
This time, in Gaza, in a way we have never witnessed before. As people in Gaza put it,… pic.twitter.com/H0mSGlintY

— Eye On Palestine (@EyeOnPalestines) November 11, 2023

The forced displacement first started to take place earlier in the 1930s when Jewish militias like Haganah units, who had fled from Western persecution, intensified their violence against the Palestinians, who owned the land and the homes, and pushed them out of their neighborhoods and villages. Due to the Zionists’ systematic brutalities against the Palestinians, about 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 became internally displaced to Gaza (190,000) and the West Bank (about 280,000), while others took refuge in the neighboring countries of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq, according to the Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestinian Question. By the end of 2022, the number of Palestinians reached 5.4 million, with 3.2 million in the West Bank and 2.2 million in the Gaza Strip, while the number of refugees around the globe reached 8.9 million Palestinians, who call for their right of return to their homeland.

Since then, Israel has continued its violations and attacked the Palestinians by expanding its illegal settlements in the occupied territories in the West Bank. The number of Israeli settlements in the West Bank reached 151 by the end of 2020, inhabited by 713,000 Israeli settlers, according to the Palestinian Statistic body in 2022. 

In continuation of its systematic ethnic cleansing, Israel has dropped leaflets titled “You wanted the war, so wait for the biggest Nakba” on the residents of the West Bank, calling on them to move to Jordan.