From May 1948:
Another 450,000 Palestinians were dispossessed and fled their homes.
In total, at least 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes over the course of the 1948 war, marking the birth of the Palestinian refugee crisis.
Somewhere between 400 and 600 Palestinian towns, cities and villages were destroyed and depopulated.
Perhaps the largest single expulsion of the war involved 50,000 Palestinians being forcibly displaced from Lydd and Ramleh. Palestinians refer to this historical moment as the Nakba, or the “Catastrophe”.
For Palestinians, and within a well-founded historiography, what happened between 1947 and 1949 was crucially not an accident or an incidental outcome of war, but part of an active and forceful campaign to ensure the establishment of a Jewish state in historic Palestine. The settler colonial project that had begun in earnest at the turn of the twentieth century required the removal of the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants of the land if a Jewish majority was to be secured.
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