Report: Palestinians Mark 74th Anniversary of 1948 Nakba

Hundreds of Palestinians marked Sunday, the 74th anniversary of the Nakba of 1948, when nearly 600,000 indigenous Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homes in historic Palestine by invading Zionist militias.

In Ramallah, in the center of the occupied West Bank, hundreds gathered outside President Yasser Arafat’s Mausoleum and waved flags of Palestine, black banners and keys of return to affirm the right of return of the Palestinian refugees and their offspring to their pre-1948 homes.

The Nakba anniversary events this year are organized under the slogan “Enough with 74 years of injustice and double standards”, which embodies the continuing injustice inflicted upon the Palestinian people to date by the Israeli occupation and the failure of the international community to implement its resolution.

At 12: 00 after midnight, a vigil of silence for 74 seconds was observed across the occupied Palestinian Territories in memory of the 74 years that followed the Nakba events, while sirens went off via loudspeakers of mosques and local radio stations. Church bells also rang during the events marking the anniversary of the tragic event.

The word “Nakba” means “catastrophe” in Arabic and refers to the systematic ethnic cleansing of two-thirds of the Palestinian population at the time by Zionist paramilitaries between 1947 and 1949 and the near-total destruction of Palestinian society.

During the events that led to the establishment of today’s Israel, Zionist forces took more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, ethnically cleansed and destroyed about 530 villages and cities, and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in a series of mass atrocities, including more than 70 massacres.

This year marks 74 years of Al-Nakba, or the Palestinian experience of dispossession and loss of a homeland. The anniversary comes at a time when many are angered by the killing of cold-blooded murder of Al Jazeera veteran journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli occupation forces last week in Jenin.

Ola Awad, the Chairperson of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), said in a report today on the 74th anniversary of the Nakba that the Palestinian population at home and in the diaspora has doubled about 10 times since the Nakba in 1948.

The population of Palestine in 1914 was around 690 thousand, of whom only 8% were Jewish. In 1948, the number of Palestinians in Palestine exceeded 2 million; 31.5% of them were Jews. Between 1932 and 1939, the largest number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine reached 225 thousand Jews. Between 1940 and 1947, more than 93 thousand Jews poured into Palestine. Thus, Palestine received around 318 thousand Jews between 1932 and 1947 and 540 thousand from 1948 to 1975.

Accordingly, their number reached 7 million (1.7 million in the occupied territories in 1948). Population estimates indicate that the number of population by the end of 2021 in the West Bank, including Jerusalem, was 3.2 million and around 2.1 million in the Gaza Strip. As for the population of the Jerusalem Governorate, it was about 477 thousand, of which approximately 65% (about 308 thousand) lived in those parts of Jerusalem which were annexed by the Israeli occupation in 1967 (J1).