1948

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.

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.

Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud

1913–1948

The 'martyr poet' — a schoolteacher who wrote of carrying his soul in his palm and was killed in battle at al-Shajara in July 1948.

Dareen Tatour

1982–

A poet from Reineh whose poem "Resist, My People, Resist Them" brought her three years of prison and house arrest — and made her case a global test of whether poetry itself can be put on trial.

Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni

1908–1948

The most prominent Palestinian field commander of his generation, who fought in the 1936–39 rebellion, rebuilt the Army of the Holy War after the partition resolution, and was killed retaking al-Qastal on 8 April 1948.

Avi Shlaim

1945–

Iraqi-born Israeli-British historian at Oxford, one of Israel's 'New Historians', whose archival work on 1948 and its aftermath challenged the founding myths of the Israeli state.

Dimitri Baramki

1909–1984

Chief archaeologist of Mandate Palestine and excavator of Hisham's Palace at Jericho, who lost his country in 1948 and rebuilt his career in the museum of the American University of Beirut.

Elias Sanbar

1947–

Carried out of Haifa as an infant in 1948, he became the historian of Palestinian photography, Darwish's French translator, and Palestine's ambassador to UNESCO.

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.

Ibrahim Abu-Lughod

1929–2001

He left Jaffa on the last ship out of the port in May 1948, built Arab-American scholarship in the United States for four decades, then returned to teach at Birzeit and be buried at home.

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.

Khalil al-Sakakini

1878–1953

Jerusalem teacher who built a school without grades or punishments, and kept a diary for forty-five years that is now one of the fullest private records of Palestinian life before 1948.

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.

Widad Kawar

1931–

Over fifty years she assembled more than two thousand Palestinian and Jordanian dresses and textiles, saving a village-by-village record of dress that 1948 had otherwise scattered.

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.

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 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 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.

The Thobe

The Palestinian dress and its regional grammar — the chest panel, the coin headdress of Ramallah, the gold-couched malak of Bethlehem — and what happened to that geography after 1948.

Absentees' Property Law (1950)

legal

An Israeli law that vested the homes, land, and assets of Palestinians who fled or were expelled during the 1948 war in a state Custodian, becoming the main legal instrument by which Israel took possession of Palestinian refugee property.

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.

Palestine Refugee

society

A Palestine refugee, in UNRWA's working definition, is a person whose normal place of residence was Palestine between 1 June 1946 and 15 May 1948 and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 war. Descendants are also eligible for registration; today some 5.9 million Palestine refugees are registered with the agency.

Right of Return

legal

The right of return is the principle that Palestinians displaced in 1948, and their descendants, are entitled to return to their homes — affirmed for the 1948 refugees by UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) of 11 December 1948 and reaffirmed by the Assembly nearly every year since.

Abu Shusha

Ramla

Abu Shusha stood on the southern slope of Tall Jazar — ancient Gezer — eight and a half kilometres southeast of Ramla, with 870 people and 9,425 dunums in 1944/45. The Givati Brigade mortared and stormed it on 13–14 May 1948 during Operation Barak; research by Birzeit University puts the number killed at around sixty, and a mass grave holding fifty-two skeletons was uncovered on the site in 1995.

Al-Bassa

Acre

Al-Bassa was a large, prosperous Muslim-Christian village on the Lebanese border — a regional market center with schools, churches, and mosques. Punished by the British with a massacre in 1938, it was stormed by the Haganah in May 1948 and almost completely razed; its ruins lie inside Shlomi and Betzet.

Al-Birwa

Acre

Al-Birwa, on a rocky hill east of Acre, was a farming village of some 1,500 people — Muslims and Christians — and the birthplace of the poet Mahmoud Darwish. Captured in July 1948, it was destroyed almost entirely; a school, two shrines, and three houses are all that remain.

Al-Damun

Acre

Al-Damun was a village on the Na'amin River southeast of Acre, home of the Zayadina clan before they rose to rule the Galilee. Captured in July 1948 during Operation Dekel and razed, its people became mostly internal refugees in nearby Tamra and Kabul; its cemetery and ruined waterworks remain in the undergrowth.

Al-Dawayima

Hebron

Al-Dawayima was one of the largest villages of the Hebron hills, with 3,710 people and more than 60,000 dunums of land in 1944/45. On 29 October 1948, during Operation Yoav, the 89th Battalion of Israel's Eighth Armoured Brigade entered the village and killed civilians in the houses, in the mosque and at the mouth of a cave. The moshav of Amatzya was built on its land in 1955.

Al-Faluja

Gaza

Al-Faluja was the anchor of the besieged 'Faluja pocket,' where Egyptian forces — among them a young Gamal Abdel Nasser — held out through the winter of 1948–49. Weeks after the Egyptian withdrawal under the armistice, the town's remaining civilians were driven out and its houses destroyed.

Al-Ghabisiyya

Acre

Al-Ghabisiyya was a village northeast of Acre that had a non-aggression pact with its Jewish neighbors — yet the Carmeli Brigade attacked it anyway in May 1948. Its people fought for years in Israel's courts to return, and lost; only the mosque and cemetery remain, and villagers still pray outside the sealed mosque.

Al-Kabri

Acre

Al-Kabri was a stone village northeast of Acre whose famous springs supplied the city's water through Ottoman aqueducts. Punished for the ambush of the Yehiam convoy, it was occupied in Operation Ben-Ami in May 1948 and leveled; today only rubble and the cemetery remain, beside the kibbutz that took its name.

Al-Khalasa

Beersheba

Al-Khalasa was built by Muslim Bedouin of the Azazma tribe in the early twentieth century among the ruins of Elusa, the Nabataean and Byzantine city that had been the capital of Palaestina Tertia. It stood twenty-three kilometres from Bir al-Sabi', with an elementary school opened in 1941. Its people were displaced in the war of 1948; the Negev Brigade held the area, and the site is now used for military training.

Al-Khayriyya

Jaffa

Al-Khayriyya — the Assyrian Banai Berka and Roman Beneberak, renamed 'the good, the giving' under the Mandate to distinguish it from Bnei Brak — dug trenches against attack from December 1947 before the Alexandroni Brigade seized it on 29 April 1948 in the encirclement of Jaffa. A handful of houses and a school survive within Giv'atayim's suburbs.

Al-Lajjun

Jenin

Al-Lajjun stood beside Tell al-Mutasallim — ancient Megiddo — at the southwestern edge of Marj Ibn Amir, on the site of the Roman camp of the Sixth Legion. Repopulated in the late nineteenth century by families from Umm al-Fahm, it counted 1,103 people in 1944/45 and was taken by the Golani Brigade at dawn on 30 May 1948. Kibbutz Megiddo was built on its lands from 1949; most of its people returned to Umm al-Fahm.

Al-Majdal

Gaza

Al-Majdal (Majdal Asqalan) was a market town of some ten thousand people, famed for its weaving, on the coastal plain north of Gaza. Captured in November 1948, its remaining residents were held under military rule and finally expelled to Gaza in 1950; the town became the Israeli city of Ashkelon's Migdal quarter.

Al-Manshiyya

Jaffa

Al-Manshiyya was the mixed Arab-Jewish quarter of Jaffa on the seafront north of the harbor. It fell to the Irgun in late April 1948 after a battle that drew in British armor, and its ruined streets were erased for a planned business district; the Hassan Bek Mosque and two other buildings are all that remain.

Al-Mujaydil

Nazareth

Al-Mujaydil stood on the Nazareth–Haifa road six kilometres southwest of Nazareth, the third largest village of its subdistrict with 1,900 people and 18,836 dunums in 1944/45, and the second largest olive producer in the district. A Golani Brigade unit took it on 14 or 15 July 1948 during Operation Dekel; the village was emptied and razed, and Migdal ha-Emeq was built on its land in 1952.

Al-Qabu

Jerusalem

Al-Qabu was a small hilltop village west of Jerusalem, its stone houses ringed by terraces of olives and grain. Captured in October 1948 during Operation Ha-Har, it was destroyed, and moshav Mevo Betar was later built on its lands.

Al-Sarafand

Ramla

Al-Sarafand — Sarafand al-Kharab — was a citrus village beside the great British camp on the Ramla plain, burned by British forces in the late 1920s and rebuilt, only to be emptied in April 1948 as fighting closed in. Nes Ziona has spread over its lands, but many houses and the village school remain.

Al-Shaykh Muwannis

Jaffa

Al-Shaykh Muwannis stood on a sandstone rise north of the Awja river, a citrus village of 1,930 people holding 15,972 dunums in 1944/45, whose leaders had reached a truce understanding with the Haganah. In March 1948 the Irgun kidnapped five of its notables; the village emptied on 30 March. Tel Aviv University stands on its land, and the sheikh's Green House is the university's faculty club.

Al-Sindiyana

Haifa

Al-Sindiyana, the 'evergreen oak' village, stood on high ground twenty-nine kilometers south of Haifa, where Napoleon fought a battle in 1799. It was depopulated on 12 May 1948, in the last days of the Mandate; its fenced site is now grazing land strewn with the rubble of its houses.

Al-Tira

Haifa

Al-Tira, seven kilometres south of Haifa on the western slopes of Mount Carmel, was the most populous village of its subdistrict, with 5,270 people and 45,262 dunums in 1944/45, and the district's largest olive producer. An Irgun raid on 12 December 1947 killed thirteen villagers; after a siege of more than two months the village fell on 16 July 1948 under naval bombardment. Tirat Karmel was built on the site in 1949.

Al-Walaja

Jerusalem

Al-Walaja, a terraced village of springs and olive groves west of Jerusalem, was emptied in October 1948 — but its people rebuilt on the fragment of their lands that fell on the West Bank side of the armistice line. Today the rebuilt village is hemmed in by settlements and nearly ringed by the separation barrier.

Al-Zeeb

Acre

Al-Zeeb was a fishing and farming village on the coast north of Acre, built over the Canaanite city of Akzib. It was taken on 14 May 1948 in Operation Ben-Ami, in the last hours of the British Mandate. Its domed mosque and the mukhtar's house still stand in the Achziv recreation area, beside kibbutzim founded on its lands.

Amqa

Acre

Amqa was a small Muslim village in the hills northeast of Acre, identified with the Talmudic Kefar Amiqo. It was captured in July 1948 during Operation Dekel and largely destroyed — only its mosque and school were left standing, used as warehouses by the moshav founded on its lands.

Ayn al-Zaytun

Safad

Ayn al-Zaytun stood a kilometre and a half north of Safad and was treated as its suburb; 820 people held 1,100 dunums in 1944/45. Palmach troops took it on 1 May 1948 as a prelude to the capture of Safad, and thirty-seven men held as prisoners were probably among some seventy people killed in a gully between the village and the city. The houses were blown up on 2 and 3 May in full view of Safad.

Ayn Ghazal

Haifa

Ayn Ghazal, on the wooded slopes of Mount Carmel south of Haifa, held out with Jaba and Ijzim in the 'little triangle' until late July 1948. Its people were expelled toward Jenin and Tulkarm, and its lands became moshav farmland and JNF forest.

Ayn Hawd

Haifa

Ayn Hawd, a Carmel hillside village south of Haifa said to descend from a commander of Saladin, was depopulated in July 1948. Its houses were never demolished: they became the Ein Hod artists' colony and its mosque a restaurant — while villagers who stayed built a new, long-unrecognized Ayn Hawd nearby.

Balad al-Shaykh

Haifa

Balad al-Shaykh, seven kilometres from Haifa, was the second largest village of its subdistrict with 4,120 people in 1944/45, and holds the grave of Izz al-Din al-Qassam. On 31 December 1947 a Palmach force of 170 men attacked it under orders to harm the largest possible number of men; more than sixty villagers were left for dead, women and children among them. The village was taken by the Carmeli Brigade on 24 April 1948 and is now Tel Hanan, part of Nesher.

Barbara

Gaza

Barbara, a grape-growing village in the coastal dunes south of Ascalon, kept a mosque holding the tomb of a fourteenth-century sage and was famed for its fruit and the long rugs woven by its women. It endured months of skirmishes before falling in the closing days of Operation Yoav in November 1948; rubble and old streets remain.

Bayt Darras

Gaza

Bayt Darras was a farming town northeast of Gaza, defended by Sudanese troops and local militiamen until the Givati Brigade overran it in May 1948. Its people fled south into the Gaza Strip, where their descendants live in refugee camps to this day.

Bayt Jibrin

Hebron

Bayt Jibrin, the Roman city of Eleutheropolis, dominated the crossroads of the southern hills until October 1948, when it was captured during Operation Yoav. Its people fled to the Hebron hills and refugee camps such as al-Fawwar and Aida; kibbutz Beit Guvrin rose on its lands.

Bayt Nabala

Ramla

Bayt Nabala looked out over the plain around Lydda from a rocky hill east of the airport, 2,310 people holding 15,051 dunums in 1944/45. On 13 July 1948 Israeli soldiers drove much of the expelled population of Lydda towards it while it was still in Arab hands; the village fell within days, during Operation Dani, and was demolished on 13 September 1948. Its people scattered to Ramallah, Deir Ammar, Rantis and the Jalazone camp.

Beit Dajan

Jaffa

Beit Dajan — biblical Beth Dagon — stood at the crossroads south of Jaffa, a citrus village of nearly four thousand people with two schools. Raided through the winter of 1948, it fell in Operation Hametz at the end of April; a moshav took its name and its lands, and one surviving house serves as a synagogue.

Burayr

Gaza

Burayr, one of the largest grain-growing villages of the Gaza coast, twice drove off attackers in early 1948 before the Palmach's Negev Brigade seized it in a single night in May, days before the Mandate ended. Five Israeli settlements were planted on its lands; scattered cactuses and the trace of its streets mark the site.

Dayr Ayyub

Ramla

Dayr Ayyub, a hamlet on the slopes above the Ramla–Jerusalem highway that revered the tomb of the prophet Job, changed hands repeatedly in the Latrun battles of 1948 and ended the war depopulated near the armistice line. No settlement was built on its lands; the eastern edge of Canada Park lies over the site.

Deir al-Hawa

Jerusalem

Deir al-Hawa was a tiny hamlet on a high ridge west of Jerusalem — sixty people in 1945, a mosque, and a shrine for a local sage. The Har'el Brigade captured it in October 1948 during Operation Ha-Har and it was obliterated; a Jewish National Fund park now spreads over its lands.

Deir Yassin

Jerusalem

Deir Yassin, a small village west of Jerusalem, was the site of the best-known massacre of the 1948 war, when Irgun and Lehi fighters killed more than a hundred villagers on 9 April 1948. Its name became shorthand for the terror that drove Palestinian flight.

Ein Karem

Jerusalem

Ein Karem, a spring-fed village in the Jerusalem hills venerated as the birthplace of John the Baptist, was the largest village of the Jerusalem district until its capture in July 1948. It survived the war with its houses intact — an emptied village that is now a picturesque Jerusalem neighborhood.

Hamama

Gaza

Hamama — 'dove' in Arabic — was one of the largest villages of the Gaza district, over five thousand people spread in a star pattern along the roads north of Gaza. Harassed from neighboring Nitzanim through early 1948 and swollen with refugees, it was occupied in late October 1948 during Operation Yoav; no trace of its houses remains.

Hittin

Tiberias

Hittin stood below the Horns of Hattin, where Salah al-Din defeated the Crusader armies in 1187, eight kilometres from Tiberias. Its 1,190 Muslim inhabitants held 22,764 dunums in 1944/45. The Seventh Brigade took the village on 17 July 1948 during Operation Dekel; those who tried to return were fired on, and most ended in Lebanon. The mosque and the shrine of al-Nabi Shu'ayb still stand.

Hulayqat

Gaza

Hulayqat was a small village northeast of Gaza, taken in May 1948, retaken by the Egyptian army in July, and finally captured a second time in October during Operation Yoav. Its ruin, partly forested with sycamore and Christ's-thorn, lies in the corridor where the Egyptian front was cut in two.

Ijzim

Haifa

Ijzim, one of the richest villages of the Carmel coast and seat of the al-Madi family, held out with two neighbors for months against Jewish forces, blocking the Tel Aviv–Haifa road. It finally fell on 24 July 1948 in Operation Shoter — a 'police action' launched during a truce — after a two-day bombardment that an Israeli officer said left 200 dead.

Iqrit

Acre

Iqrit was a Greek Catholic village in the northern Galilee whose residents left in November 1948 on the army's promise that they could return within weeks. Israel's Supreme Court ruled their evacuation illegal — but on Christmas Eve 1951 the village was demolished, and the people of Iqrit have been fighting to go home ever since.

Isdud

Gaza

Isdud — ancient Ashdod — was a market town of nearly five thousand on the coastal highway north of Gaza, with two mosques, three shrines, schools, a train station, and a Wednesday market. It was the Egyptian army's northernmost stand of 1948, falling in late October during Operation Yoav; modern Ashdod rose on its lands.

Jaba'

Haifa

Jaba' was a village on the western slopes of Mount Carmel whose fighters blocked the coast road for months in 1948. It asked to negotiate a surrender and got no answer; days into the second truce it was taken in Operation Shoter, and its people fled or were expelled. A lone shrine still stands over the rubble.

Julis

Gaza

Julis, set on a wadi bank beside a road junction and a British military camp on the Gaza coast highway, fell to the Giv'ati Brigade around the first truce of 1948 and then held against the Egyptian counterattack in which Gamal Abdel Nasser served as staff officer. A few cement houses remain beside the old camp.

Kafr Bir'im

Safad

Kafr Bir'im was a Maronite stone-built village in the Upper Galilee, surrounded by gardens, olive groves, and vineyards. Its people were ordered out in November 1948 on a promise of return; instead the village was bombed in 1953, and only its church and bell tower still stand above the ruins.

Kafr Lam

Haifa

Kafr Lam was a small grain-farming village on the coast south of Haifa, crowded inside the walls of an early Islamic ribat that the Crusaders called Cafarlet. Cleared of its people by July 1948, it escaped demolition thanks to its ruins; the fortress and several houses still stand within the moshav of HaBonim.

Kaufakha

Gaza

Kaufakha was a farming village east of Gaza, founded by Gaza city families in the late nineteenth century around a well-known mosque. Its people repeatedly asked to surrender and stay, to no avail: the Palmach's Negev Brigade expelled them in late May 1948. Only the mosque remains, used as a stable and fodder store.

Kawkab al-Hawa

Beisan

Kawkab al-Hawa was built inside the walls of the Crusader fortress of Belvoir, three hundred metres above the Jordan valley eleven kilometres north of Baysan. Its 300 people held 9,949 dunums in 1944/45. It was attacked on 16 May 1948, changed hands during the Iraqi advance, and was finally held by the Golani Brigade. The Arab village was erased; the castle was excavated and turned into a tourist site.

Kuwaykat

Acre

Kuwaykat lay nine kilometres northeast of Acre on some of the most fertile land in the subdistrict, 1,050 people holding 4,733 dunums in 1944/45. Its militia repulsed attacks in January, February and June 1948; on the night the first truce ended, 9 July, the village was shelled without warning during Operation Dekel and its people fled. Kibbutz Beit HaEmek was founded on its lands in January 1949.

Lifta

Jerusalem

Lifta, at the western gateway to Jerusalem, was emptied of its roughly 3,000 residents in the first months of 1948. Its stone houses still stand in the valley below the highway, making it the most visibly surviving depopulated Palestinian village and a focus of return and preservation campaigns.

Lubya

Tiberias

Lubya, one of the largest villages of the Tiberias district, stood on a rocky hill over the Nazareth road and twice beat back attacks before its people fled the fall of Nazareth in July 1948. Its ruins lie under the JNF's Lavi and South Africa pine forests — a landscape of erasure that refugee historians have made one of the best-documented of any village.

Ma'lul

Nazareth

Ma'lul lay six kilometres west of Nazareth, a village of 490 Muslims and 200 Christians who had lost title to most of their land through a twenty-year legal battle with the Jewish National Fund before 1948. Israeli forces took it on 15 July 1948 during Operation Dekel and levelled the houses. Its mosque and two churches still stand inside a JNF pine forest.

Al-Muharraqa

Gaza

Al-Muharraqa was a small barley-growing village east of Gaza whose lands had been waqf endowments for Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock. Raided with Kaufakha in late May 1948, its people were driven out, and in mid-August — during the second truce — Israeli forces mined and destroyed the village.

Najd

Gaza

Najd — its name means 'elevated ground' — was a small farming village northeast of Gaza whose children walked to school in Simsim. Its people were expelled by the Palmach's Negev Brigade on 13 May 1948, two days before the Mandate ended; Sderot was founded on its lands in 1951.

Nasir al-Din

Tiberias

Nasir al-Din was a village of ninety people three kilometres from Tiberias, attacked by two platoons of the Golani Brigade on 11 or 12 April 1948 as a demonstration intended to break the nerve of the city. Accounts of the dead range from eight men, one woman and an unspecified number of children in a British communiqué to ten in Arif al-Arif's account. Tiberias fell six days later; houses of the city now stand on the site.

Qaluniyya

Jerusalem

Qaluniyya was a village on the Jerusalem–Jaffa highway whose name preserved the Roman Colonia founded on the ruins of Jewish Motza. Days after Deir Yassin, in April 1948, Haganah forces entered and blew up fifty of its houses; its ruins lie beside Motza, and Mevaseret Zion spreads over its lands.

Qaqun

Tulkarm

Qaqun, crowned by a Crusader-Mamluk fortress northwest of Tulkarm, was stormed by the Alexandroni Brigade in June 1948 in one of the bloodiest battles of the war, fought trench-to-trench against Iraqi defenders. Some villagers held on in their homes into 1949; the fortress and the school still stand above its orchards.

Al-Qastal

Jerusalem

Al-Qastal was a tiny village on a commanding hill above the Jaffa–Jerusalem road. In April 1948 it became the pivot of the battle for Jerusalem: Palmach troops seized it during Operation Nachshon, and Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, the best-known Palestinian commander of the war, was killed trying to win it back.

Qastina

Gaza

Qastina stood on the highway between al-Majdal and the Jerusalem–Jaffa road, its 890 people farming grain and citrus beside the British camp at Beer Tuvia. The Giv'ati Brigade seized it days after the first truce ended, in July 1948; Kiryat Malakhi and several settlements later rose on its lands.

Saffuriyya

Nazareth

Saffuriyya was the largest village of the Nazareth district — a place layered over ancient Sepphoris — until it was bombed and occupied in July 1948. Its people scattered to Nazareth and to refugee camps in Lebanon; the moshav of Zippori and an archaeological park now occupy its lands.

Salama

Jaffa

Salama, the largest village on Jaffa's eastern approaches and home of the shrine of the Prophet's companion Salama Abu Hashim, fought off attack after attack from December 1947 — the Haganah's own history calls its December assault 'the first attack on an Arab village' — before falling on 29 April 1948. Its mosque, shrine, and shuttered houses stand inside Tel Aviv's sprawl.

Samakh

Tiberias

Samakh was the largest village of the Tiberias subdistrict, 3,460 people on the southern shore of Lake Tiberias with a station on the line to the Hijaz railway and the border crossing to Mandate Syria. The Golani Brigade took it on 28 April 1948, ten days after the fall of Tiberias; Syrian and Iraqi forces briefly retook it in May. Only the ruins of the railway station and a water reservoir remain.

Sa'sa'

Safad

Sa'sa' stood at 875 metres in the upper Galilee with 1,130 people and 14,796 dunums in 1944/45. A Palmach raid on 15 February 1948 blew up houses in the night under orders to destroy twenty and kill as many fighters as possible; the New York Times reported eleven villagers killed, five of them small children. The village was taken by the Seventh Brigade on 30 October during Operation Hiram, and kibbutz Sasa was founded on the site in 1949.

Simsim

Gaza

Simsim, a circular village of gardens and deep wells northeast of Gaza and the hometown of a leader of the 1936 revolt, was captured and emptied by the Palmach's Negev Brigade in mid-May 1948, a day after neighboring Burayr fell. The site was obliterated; only cypress and sycamore trees mark it.

Sirin

Beisan

Sirin lay seventeen kilometres north of Baysan, a village of 810 Muslims and Christians holding 28,445 dunums in 1944/45, with Byzantine mosaics and a Greek inscription among its houses. Units of the Golani Brigade occupied it on 12 May 1948, the day Baysan fell. No Israeli settlement was built on its land; a cemetery and a single house survive.

Suba

Jerusalem

Suba stood on a conical hill above the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv road, its stone houses built among the ruins of a Crusader castle. Captured in July 1948 during Operation Danny, it survives as one of the more complete village ruins in the Jerusalem corridor, within a national park beside Kibbutz Tzova.

Suhmata

Acre

Suhmata stood on two hilltops at six hundred metres in the upper Galilee, a village of 1,130 Muslims and Christians holding 17,056 dunums in 1944/45, with a Byzantine church of 555 CE and a Crusader castle on its ground. It was bombed from the air on 28 October 1948 and taken on 30 October by the Golani Brigade's First Battalion during Operation Hiram. The site was renamed Tzuriel and made ready for Jewish immigrants by May 1949.

Summil

Gaza

Summil, a grain and sheep village on a wadi-ringed sandy hill whose revenues the Mamluks once endowed to Hebron's Ibrahimi mosque, fell in the Giv'ati Brigade's push south during the 'Ten Days' of July 1948, its people most likely driven toward Hebron. A length of old wall and a cactus-lined road remain.

Tantura

Haifa

Tantura, a coastal village south of Haifa, was captured in May 1948, when scores of its residents were killed — a massacre documented in Teddy Katz's contested thesis and revisited by Alon Schwarz's 2022 documentary "Tantura." The site now lies beneath the beaches of Dor.

Tarshiha

Acre

Tarshiha was a large Muslim-Christian town of the upper Galilee, a tobacco-growing and craft center, bombed and captured in Operation Hiram in late October 1948. Most of its people fled or were driven into Lebanon, but several hundred remained or returned; its old core survives inside the merged city of Ma'alot-Tarshiha.

Umm Khalid

Tulkarm

Umm Khalid stood on a sandstone hill less than two kilometres from the sea, on the site of the Crusader Castellum Rogerii Langobardi, with 970 people and 2,894 dunums in 1944/45. Netanya was founded on its land in 1929 and grew around it. An Israeli intelligence report records that the village was evacuated on 20 March 1948 out of a general sense of fear; villagers described a month of blockade beforehand.

Wadi al-Hawarith

Tulkarm

The people of Wadi al-Hawarith had farmed some 30,000 dunums of the coastal plain for three and a half centuries as tenants when, in 1929, the Jewish National Fund bought the land at a court auction from absentee heirs. Their resistance to eviction became the central land case of Mandate Palestine; the courts ruled against them in 1932 and the first expulsions followed in June 1933. The remaining villagers, 1,330 in 1944/45, left on 15 March 1948.

Yazur

Jaffa

Yazur — the Azuru of Sennacherib's annals and the birthplace of a Fatimid vizier — was bombed and raided for months from December 1947 before falling at the end of April 1948, as Operation Hametz encircled Jaffa. Two shrines and scattered houses still stand among the apartment blocks of Azor and Holon.

Yibna

Ramla

Yibna — biblical Jabneel, Roman Jamnia, seat of the Sanhedrin after Jerusalem's destruction — was a town of over five thousand with a station on the Gaza–Lydda railway and a mosque praised by medieval geographers. It fell in early June 1948 as Israeli forces pushed south; its mosque and shrine stand dilapidated beside modern Yavne.

Zikrin

Hebron

Zikrin grew grain where the southern coastal plain meets the foothills of the Hebron mountains. The Giv'ati Brigade occupied it in late October 1948 during Operation Yoav; its site, known as Khirbet Dhikrin, is overgrown scrub marked by broken terraces, olive and carob trees, and the rubble of houses.

Zir'in

Jenin

Zir'in stood on a spur above Marj Ibn Amir, on the site of biblical Jezreel and beside the spring of Ayn Jalut where Baybars turned back the Mongols in 1260. Its 1,420 people held 23,920 dunums in 1944/45. The Fourth Battalion of the Golani Brigade took the village on 28 May 1948; the kibbutz of Yizre'el was founded on its northwestern side the same year.

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.

Balata Camp

Nablus, West Bank

Laid out in 1950 on rented farmland east of Nablus for 4,484 refugees, Balata became the most crowded refugee camp in the West Bank — a quarter square kilometre holding the descendants of some 111 destroyed towns and villages, and the place where organised refugee-rights politics in the West Bank began.

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.

Dheisheh Camp

Bethlehem, West Bank

Established in 1949 on a third of a square kilometre south of Bethlehem, Dheisheh gathered the survivors of as many as 79 villages from six subdistricts — Hebron, Jerusalem, Ramla, Gaza, Bir al-Sabi' and Jaffa; Zakariyya, Bayt Nattif, Ras Abu Ammar, al-Walaja and al-Qabu among them — into one of the most politically formidable camps in Palestine.

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.

Jericho

Jordan Valley, West Bank

Jericho — Ariha, the city of palms, some 250 metres below the sea — has lived beside its spring for roughly ten thousand years, longer perhaps than any city on earth. In living memory its valley twice filled with refugees; the camps of 1948, Aqabat Jabr and Ein as-Sultan, are still there.

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.

Nazareth

Lower Galilee

Nazareth — al-Nasira, the childhood home of Jesus — is the city that survived 1948: ordered emptied, it was spared by a single officer's refusal, and grew into the largest Palestinian city in Israel and the cultural capital of the Palestinians of '48.

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.

Sakhnin

Lower Galilee

A Galilee town in the valley below the Battuf. Three of the six people killed on the first Land Day, 30 March 1976, were from Sakhnin, and the town was the centre of the day's heaviest confrontations. The general strike that produced them was the first time since 1948 that the Palestinians inside Israel acted as a national collective.

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.

Umm al-Fahm

Wadi Ara, the Triangle

Umm al-Fahm was not conquered in 1948 — it was handed over. Under the armistice signed at Rhodes in April 1949 the Little Triangle passed from Iraqi-held ground to Israel, and its people woke up as citizens of a state they had not fought for, under military rule, with most of their land taken.

There is no Palestinian right of return

legal

UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) of 11 December 1948 resolved that refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace 'should be permitted to do so,' and the right to return to one's own country is also codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Art. 13(2)) and the binding ICCPR (Art. 12(4)).

Palestinians did not exist before 1948 — they are an invented people

rhetoric

The documented record shows an Arabic-speaking Palestinian society with its own press, politics and institutions long before 1948 — the newspaper Falastin was founded in Jaffa in 1911 — and the claim mostly confuses the (normal) modernity of all national identities with non-existence.

The Palestinians left voluntarily in 1948, because Arab leaders told them to leave

history

Israel's own intelligence service concluded in June 1948 that about 70% of the Palestinian exodus was caused by Jewish military action and only some 5% by orders from Arab institutions — and no blanket Arab-leadership evacuation order has ever been found in the archives examined by Israeli and other historians.

Abdel Mahdi al-Wuheidi

Driven from Bir al-Saba as a child in 1948 and from Jabalia camp in 2023, he returned after the October 2025 ceasefire to a house standing in rubble.

Abdullah Nashwan

Eleven years old when his family fled the massacre at al-Dawayima in October 1948; displaced again in 1967, he has lived in Jordan's Baqa'a camp since.

Abed Abdi

A six-year-old expelled from Haifa in April 1948 recalls the crowds fleeing to the port; he returned with his family three years later and became a renowned visual artist.

Ameen Muhammad Ali (Abu Arab)

Thirteen years old when Saffuriyya was attacked in July 1948, he describes the air raid that emptied the village during the Ramadan iftar.

Ahmad al-Haj

A survivor from al-Sawafir al-Sharqiyya in the Gaza district, fifteen in 1948, describes the burning of his village and a warplane attack during the family's flight.

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.

Fahimi Zeidan

A twelve-year-old survivor of the 9 April 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin describes the killing of her family, in a statement recorded by British police officers days after the attack.

Ghada Karmi

A Jerusalem childhood ended in April 1948: days after Deir Yassin, nine-year-old Ghada Karmi's family packed a few summer clothes and left their Qatamon home, believing they would be back within weeks.

Ibrahim Abu-Lughod

A nineteen-year-old Jaffa high-school student, he sat his matriculation exams in March 1948 under nightly mortar bombardment — 'Daily we knew people who got killed. We buried them.' — and weeks later fled the falling city by sea.

Ismail Shammout

Expelled from Lydda at eighteen during the July 1948 "death march," he recalls an Israeli soldier stopping him at gunpoint from filling a pot with water as thousands trudged toward Ramallah in the heat.

Jaber Ahmad Mohammad Shaban

A survivor from Simsim, northeast of Gaza, describes the May 1948 attack that drove his family out of the village when he was ten years old.

Leila Giries

Eight years old when her family fled Ayn Karim on the western edge of Jerusalem in 1948; the family moved to the United States in 1958, and she now lives in a suburb of Los Angeles with the key to the house framed on her wall.

Mohammed Abdul Jabbar Abu Seif

A 91-year-old survivor from Julis, in the Gaza district, recalls his family's expulsion in 1948 and a lifetime in the refugee camps of Bureij and Nuseirat.

Muhammad Abu Hana

A twelve-year-old during the assault on al-Tantura in May 1948 describes the roundup on the beach that preceded the killing of scores of the village's men.

Mutlaq Mahmoud Abu Elkhair

A 96-year-old survivor from Barqa, depopulated in May 1948, recalls walking down the coast into Gaza with his family, expecting to be home again within days.

Omar Abedelal

A nine-year-old when Burayr was besieged and depopulated in 1948, he recalls the farmland his family had worked for generations and the return they never stopped expecting.

Ouda Salem Ouda Abu Haddaf

A Bedouin survivor from the Naqab, born in 1936, describes the 1948 attack on his village and the chain of displacements that ended in the refugee camps of Gaza.

Reja-e Busailah

A visually impaired teenager during the July 1948 expulsion from Lydda, he recalls being herded east on foot in the exodus that became known as the Lydda death march.

Salwa Naser

Six years old when her family left Jaffa by boat in 1948, and a refugee for the second time in 2012 when the war in Syria destroyed her home in Damascus.

Umm Omar

Eight years old when her family was expelled from Jusayr in 1948; she has lived in Jabaliya refugee camp ever since.

Wajiha al-Harsh

An 80-year-old refugee from Jaffa, living in the Jabaliya camp's 'Jaffa neighborhood' in Gaza, recalls the panic of the May 1948 flight from her city.

Yacoub Odeh

An eight-year-old when Lifta was emptied in early 1948, he recalls fleeing with nothing but the clothes his family wore, certain they would be back the next day.

Zakaria Elnatour

A refugee from al-Sumayriyya, between Acre and Nahariya, describes the 1948 capture of his village and his family's flight to Lebanon and Syria, in a letter to a Jewish student.

The Record of 1948

A guided walk through the year that remade Palestine: the villages emptied, the survivors who testified, the documents that answer the denials.

The Abu Ghazaleh family

Jaffa

A Jaffa mercantile family scattered by 1948 — oil dealers and ice makers whose ten-year-old son Talal walked out of the city a refugee and built the Talal Abu-Ghazaleh Organization in exile, spending a career insisting that the record show his birthplace as Jaffa.

The Dajani family

Jerusalem / Jaffa

Guardians of the Nabi Daoud shrine on Mount Zion and twice Jerusalem's mayors, the Dajanis were among the city's wealthiest houses before 1948 — with a Jaffa branch that carried the name into the PLO.

The Jarallah family

Jerusalem

A Jerusalem house of religious learning — muftis, qadis, madrasa teachers and al-Aqsa preachers documented from the Mamluk period onward, their line culminating in Hussam al-Din Jarallah, who won the most votes in the 1921 mufti election, stepped aside under British pressure, and finally held the Jerusalem muftiate from 1948 until his death.