Nakba
النكبة
The Nakba — Arabic for 'catastrophe' — is the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 war surrounding the creation of Israel, when more than 700,000 Palestinians, over half of Palestine's Arab population, fled or were expelled from their homes and were never permitted to return.
The displacement unfolded in stages between late 1947 and early 1949. After the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine in November 1947, fighting between Palestinian Arabs and Jewish forces escalated into full war with the end of the British Mandate, the declaration of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948, and the entry of neighboring Arab armies. By the armistice agreements of 1949, more than 400 Palestinian villages had been destroyed or depopulated, and most of the Arab residents of cities such as Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, Lydda, and Ramla were gone. Their lands and homes were absorbed by the new state, and the refugees were barred from returning.
The refugees and their descendants — today numbering in the millions registered with UNRWA — settled in camps in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, and in a wider diaspora. As early as December 1948, the UN General Assembly called in Resolution 194 for the refugees’ return, restitution of property, and compensation; the demand remains unmet and sits at the core of the unresolved conflict.
Palestinians mark the Nakba each year on 15 May. The word names not only the events of 1948 but what many Palestinians describe as a continuing process of dispossession — through settlement, eviction, and denial of return. In 2023 the United Nations commemorated the Nakba’s seventy-fifth anniversary at the General Assembly for the first time, and it has done so annually since.
Sources
Cited works
2- un.org — about the nakba(opens in a new tab)https://www.un.org/unispal/about-the-nakba/
- palquest.org — nakba(opens in a new tab)https://www.palquest.org/en/highlight/160/nakba
Connected in the archive
20 connected records20 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
names this record — 19 records
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- The Record of 1948
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: The word and its weight — what Nakba means, precisely.
- Abdel Mahdi al-Wuheidi
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: A Nakba at the beginning of my life … and another Nakba at the end of it.
- Adel Mannaعادل مناع
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Nakba and Survival reconstructs, from oral testimony and from Palestinian and Israeli archives, diaries and memoirs, what happened to the Palestinians of Haifa and the Galilee during the war and through the decade of military government that followed — including those who were displaced and then made their way back.
- All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: A team of field researchers under Walid Khalidi's direction documented 418 Palestinian villages depopulated during the Nakba of 1948, recording for each its location, population, land holdings, and fate — what was destroyed, what was built over it, and what physically remains: a shrine, a schoolhouse, a row of cacti marking where a village stood.
- BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: - A dedicated legal focus on refugee and IDP rights — the core unresolved question of the Nakba.
- Blood
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: The poem was collected in Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (1995) and again in Fuel (1998), and it has become one of Nye's most anthologized works — it also appears in A Map of Absence: An Anthology of Palestinian Writing on the Nakba (Saqi, 2019).
- and 13 more
named in this record — 1 record
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- UN General Assembly Resolution 194
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: As early as December 1948, the UN General Assembly called in Resolution 194 for the refugees' return, restitution of property, and compensation; the demand remains unmet and sits at the core of the unresolved conflict.
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“Nakba.” Glossary, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/glossary/nakba.- MLA
“Nakba.” Glossary, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/glossary/nakba. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-nakba, title = {Nakba}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/glossary/nakba}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }