The Nakba
More than 700,000 Palestinians are expelled or flee from their homes during the war surrounding Israel's establishment; over 400 villages are depopulated or destroyed.
Between late 1947 and early 1949, more than 700,000 Palestinians — over half the Arab population of Mandatory Palestine — were expelled from or fled their homes in the war that accompanied the establishment of the State of Israel. More than 400 Palestinian villages were depopulated, and most were subsequently destroyed or repopulated with new residents. Palestinians call this catastrophe the Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe.”
Israel declared independence on 14 May 1948; the armies of neighboring Arab states entered the war the following day. By the armistice agreements of 1949, Israel controlled about 78 percent of Mandatory Palestine. The remaining territory — the West Bank and Gaza Strip — came under Jordanian and Egyptian administration respectively, and absorbed waves of refugees.
The refugees and their descendants were never permitted to return, despite UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 1948, which resolved that refugees wishing to return and live at peace should be permitted to do so. Today, several million registered Palestine refugees live under UNRWA’s mandate across the region, and the Nakba is commemorated annually on 15 May.
Cited works
2- un.org — about the nakba(opens in a new tab)https://www.un.org/unispal/about-the-nakba/
- unrwa.org — palestine refugees(opens in a new tab)https://www.unrwa.org/palestine-refugees
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: Begin with the event itself: what happened between the partition vote and the armistice.
- 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: The refugees and their descendants were never permitted to return, despite UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 1948, which resolved that refugees wishing to return and live at peace should be permitted to do so.
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“The Nakba.” Timeline, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/timeline/the-nakba.- MLA
“The Nakba.” Timeline, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/timeline/the-nakba. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-the-nakba, title = {The Nakba}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/timeline/the-nakba}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }