The Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip has led to a displacement crisis of historic magnitude. According to international assessments, about 1.9 million Palestinians are displaced in Gaza—85 percent of the population. More than a million of them have fled from the northern part of Gaza following Israel’s instructions. The pictures, stories, and videos appearing on social media since the beginning of the war, with Palestinian families fleeing with light luggage, feel to many like a national flashback to the Nakba, an Arabic word that means “catastrophe.”. It is the name given to the national trauma of the displacement of about 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The tragedy of this displacement runs deep in Palestinian history.
And statements made by top Israeli officials aggravate the fear that the current crisis will end up replicating the trauma of the Nakba. Avi Dichter, Israel’s minister of agriculture and rural development, said that the displacement in Gaza will go down as the “Gaza Nakba of 2023.”
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