The Nakba

The Nakba Archive — filmed testimony of 1948 refugees in Lebanon

The Nakba Archive

A grassroots oral history collective founded in Lebanon in 2002 that has filmed more than 650 video interviews with first-generation Palestinian refugees about life before 1948 and the expulsions that made them refugees.

Palestine Open Maps

Palestine Open Maps

An open platform layering historical maps of Palestine — including detailed 1940s British Mandate survey sheets — with present-day maps, documenting hundreds of villages depopulated in 1948.

Palestine Remembered — Nakba Oral History Project and village memory

Palestine Remembered

A long-running, non-commercial website documenting Palestine's depopulated villages, whose Nakba Oral History Project publishes hundreds of recorded interviews with refugees who witnessed the events of 1948 firsthand.

Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA) — Nakba testimony at the American University of Beirut

Palestinian Oral History Archive, American University of Beirut

A searchable digital archive at the American University of Beirut holding more than 1,000 hours of audio and video testimony recorded with first-generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, drawn from over 150 uprooted villages and communities.

Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest) — Institute for Palestine Studies

Institute for Palestine Studies

A free, bilingual interactive encyclopedia from the Institute for Palestine Studies and the Palestinian Museum, tracing modern Palestinian history through thousands of chronology entries, biographies, documents, and village profiles rooted in refugee and Nakba memory.

Visualizing Palestine

Visualizing Palestine

Founded in 2012, Visualizing Palestine produces data-driven infographics and visual stories about Palestinian life, rights, and history, published under Creative Commons licenses for free reuse.

Zochrot — testimony and remembering projects on the Nakba

Zochrot

An Israeli organization, founded in 2002, that documents the Nakba for a Hebrew-speaking audience through refugee testimony, tours of destroyed Palestinian villages, and filmed interviews with both displaced Palestinians and Israeli veterans of 1948.

George Habash

1925–2008

The physician from Lydda, expelled with his town in 1948, who founded the Arab Nationalist Movement and then the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Ilan Pappé

1954–

Israeli historian at the University of Exeter whose archival work on 1948 reshaped the scholarly debate over the Nakba.

Ismail Shammout

1930–2006

Pioneering Palestinian painter whose images of the 1948 expulsion from Lydda — above all *Where to?* (1953) — became icons of the Nakba.

Karimeh Abbud

1893–1940

The first woman photographer in Palestine, who stamped her prints 'Karimeh Abbud — Lady Photographer' and left a portrait record of Palestinian life two decades before the Nakba.

Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad)

1935–1988

Expelled from Ramla at twelve, he co-founded Fatah in Kuwait in 1959, ran its operations inside occupied Palestine, helped architect the First Intifada, and was assassinated by an Israeli commando unit in Tunis in 1988.

Nur Masalha

1957–

Palestinian historian whose work on memory, the Nakba, and the long history of Palestine challenges the erasure of the country's indigenous past.

Rashid Khalidi

1948–

Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and one of the most influential historians of modern Palestine.

Salman Abu Sitta

1937–

Civil engineer turned mapmaker, who spent decades reconstructing the villages, land holdings, and place names of pre-1948 Palestine into an atlas and a register of the depopulated.

Walid Khalidi

1925–2026

Palestinian historian whose documentary works, above all *All That Remains*, preserved the record of the villages emptied in 1948.

A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples

Ilan Pappé

A landmark one-volume history of Palestine from the late Ottoman era to the present — the story of one land and two peoples, told from below.

All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948

Walid Khalidi (ed.)

A monumental village-by-village record of the more than four hundred Palestinian communities depopulated in 1948 — the definitive documentary reference on the Nakba.

Gate of the Sun

Elias Khoury

In a Beirut hospital, stories are told to a comatose fighter — an epic retelling of the Palestinian exodus from Galilee to the camps.

Minor Detail

Adania Shibli

A rape and murder in the Negev in 1949, and a woman in present-day Ramallah who cannot let it go — a novel of devastating formal precision.

Mornings in Jenin

Susan Abulhawa

A multi-generational family saga from a village near Acre to the Jenin refugee camp — the novel that brought the Palestinian story to millions of readers worldwide.

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Ilan Pappé

Drawing on Israeli military archives, Pappé documents the deliberate expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 — and names it ethnic cleansing.

The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East

Sandy Tolan

The true story of a house in Ramla, the Palestinian family expelled from it, the Jewish family who moved in — and the friendship that grew around the lemon tree in its yard.

The Battle of al-Qastal

1948

Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, commander of the Army of the Holy War, is killed retaking the village of al-Qastal on the Jerusalem road — a loss from which Palestinian irregular forces never recovered.

The Armistice Agreements

1949

Four agreements signed between February and July 1949 — Egypt's and Jordan's on Rhodes, Lebanon's at Ras al-Naqoura, Syria's at Hill 232 near Mahanayim — ended the fighting and drew the Green Line, a military demarcation the parties expressly agreed was not a political border. No peace treaty followed for thirty years.

The Expulsion of Lydda and Ramle

1948

Between the two UN truces of July 1948, Israeli forces took the twin cities of Lydda and Ramle and expelled their populations on foot toward the Arab lines. Close to a thousand people died in the cities and on the road.

Plan Dalet

1948

The Haganah's Plan D, finalised on 10 March 1948 and set in motion in early April, provided for securing the area of the Jewish state and the settlements beyond it — including, where villages resisted, their destruction and the expulsion of their inhabitants.

The Nakba

1948

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.

UN General Assembly Resolution 194

1948

Adopted on 11 December 1948, resolution 194 (III) established the Conciliation Commission for Palestine and, in paragraph 11, resolved that refugees wishing to return to their homes should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, with compensation for those choosing not to return.

The Jaffa Orange

The Shamouti orange, bred by Palestinian growers near Jaffa in the mid-nineteenth century — Palestine's great export, and after 1948 a brand without its farmers.

Keys of Return

The house keys carried out of Palestine in 1948, passed down through refugee generations as deeds to homes and to memory.

The Sabr

The prickly pear, whose Arabic name means patience: planted as a field boundary before 1948, and now growing in hedges that trace the outlines of villages that are no longer there.

Fellahin

society

The peasant cultivators who made up the large majority of Palestine's population before 1948 — the class whose villages were destroyed in the Nakba, and whose dress, food, songs and calendar became, in exile, the national culture.

Nakba

history

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.

Acre

Western Galilee coast

Acre — Akka — is the walled city that broke Napoleon: a Phoenician port, the Crusaders' last capital, and an Ottoman citadel-town whose Old City is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Most of its people were expelled in 1948; among its exiled children was Ghassan Kanafani.

Bir al-Saba

Naqab (Negev)

Bir al-Saba — Beersheba, the 'well of the seven' — was the Ottomans' planned capital of the Naqab and the market town of its Bedouin tribes until October 1948, when the town fell and most of the Naqab's people were driven into exile. The wells remain; so does the Bedouin struggle for the land around them.

Deir al-Balah

Gaza Strip

Deir al-Balah — the 'Monastery of Dates' — grew around a fourth-century monastery on the ancient coast road, hid a Bronze Age cemetery beneath its soil, and after 1948 became town and refugee camp together in the narrow heart of the Gaza Strip.

Haifa

Haifa Bay, northern coast

Haifa grew under the Mandate into Palestine's great industrial port, a mixed Arab-Jewish city climbing Mount Carmel — until April 1948 emptied most of its Palestinian neighborhoods by sea. Kanafani's Returning to Haifa made it the literature's city of return.

Jabalia

Gaza Strip

Jabalia, the market town on the rise northeast of Gaza City, became after 1948 the site of the largest refugee camp in the Strip; the first intifada began in its alleys in December 1987, and the war since 2023 has returned to it again and again.

Jaffa

Central coast, historic Jaffa District

Jaffa — Yafa, the Bride of the Sea — was Palestine's gateway and its orange capital until 1948, when most of its seventy thousand people were driven out by land and sea. A Palestinian community endures in Ajami, and the city's name still opens every account of the Nakba.

Jenin

Northern West Bank

Jenin guarded the pass to the Jezreel plain for millennia, defied the British in the 1936 revolt, and held off Israel in June 1948; its refugee camp, born of the Nakba, fought the army for ten days in April 2002. The raids still come. The memory holds.

Khan Younis

Gaza Strip

Khan Younis began in 1387 as a Mamluk caravanserai on the Egypt road and grew into the Gaza district's second town; 1948 made its refugee camp one of the Strip's largest, November 1956 left it a massacre to mourn, and the war since 2023 has left much of the city in ruins.

Lydda

Central Palestine

A railway city of some 18,000 people, allotted to the Arab state under the partition plan, taken in the fighting of 10–12 July 1948 and emptied on the 13th. Its Monday market served the whole district; its airport was the country's international gateway; the town that remained was renamed Lod.

Rafah

Gaza Strip

Rafah is ancient Raphia, the border town where armies have met since the pharaohs; 1948 filled it with refugees, 1956 left it a massacre to mourn, and the 2024 assault on the city — then sheltering over a million displaced people — was ordered halted by the International Court of Justice.

Ramle

Central Palestine

The one major city in Palestine founded by Muslim rulers rather than inherited from earlier civilisations — built early in the eighth century as the capital of Jund Filastin, and named for the sand it stood on. Assigned to the Arab state in 1947, it was occupied on 12 July 1948 and its people expelled the following day.

Safed

Upper Galilee

Safed — Safad, the city on the hill — was a Galilee town of mystics, weavers and rebels until May 1948, when nearly all of its roughly ten thousand Palestinians fled or were driven out as the town fell. Its stone Arab quarter survives as an artists' colony, and its refugees carry Safad with them still.

Tiberias

Sea of Galilee

Tiberias — Tabariyya — was sacred to Jews since the Sanhedrin sat by its shore, and Palestine's most evenly mixed city, until April 1948, when its entire Arab population was convoyed out in two days. The childhood town of Fayez Sayegh; most of its Ottoman old city was later demolished.

Tulkarm

West Bank

Tulkarm — the 'Mount of the Vineyard' — was the market town where the Samarian hills meet the coastal plain, until the 1949 armistice line took most of its fields; its refugee camp is among the largest in the West Bank, and its streets have known every army of the last century.

Dalal Nassar

An 84-year-old refugee from Julis recalls walking to Gaza as a girl during the 1948 exodus and the humiliation of the first years in tents at Deir al-Balah.

Salman Abu Sitta

Salman Abu Sitta, expelled from Ma'in near Beersheba at the age of ten, speaks to Al Jazeera about the Nakba and his life's work mapping the destroyed villages of Palestine.