Nakba in the context of "Plan Dalet"

During the Gaza war, the Israel Defense Forces ordered mass evacuations in Gaza, which the IDF said were to minimize civilian casualties in its war against Hamas, resulting in one of the largest displacements of Palestinians since 1948. On 13 October 2023, just one week after Hamas' attack on Israel, Israel instructed 1.1 million Gazans north of the Wadi Gaza, including those in Gaza City, to evacuate within 24 hours. This evacuation triggered a humanitarian crisis, which Palestinians (and some Israelis) have compared to the Nakba of 1948.

Israel's ground invasion of Gaza began on 27 October 2023. By early November 2024, around 800,000 to 1 million Gazans had relocated to the southern part of the Strip, while 350,000 to 400,000 remained in the north. Evacuees described the perilous journey as filled with fear and insecurity, citing attacks by the Israeli military and the sight of corpses along the evacuation routes. Even after reaching the south, evacuees faced continued bombings, leaving no truly safe place in Gaza.

In the 1948 Palestine war, more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs – about half of Mandatory Palestine's predominantly Arab population – were expelled or fled from their homes. Expulsions and attacks against Palestinians were carried out by the Zionist paramilitaries Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi, which merged to become the Israel Defense Forces after the establishment of Israel part way through the war. The expulsion and flight was a central component of the fracturing, dispossession, and displacement of Palestinian society, known as the Nakba. Dozens of massacres targeting Arabs were conducted by Israeli military forces and between 400 and 600 Palestinian villages were destroyed. Village wells were poisoned in a biological warfare programme, properties were looted to prevent Palestinian refugees from returning, and some sites were subject to Hebraization of Palestinian place names.

The precise number of Palestinian refugees, many of whom settled in Palestinian refugee camps in neighboring states, is a matter of dispute, although the number is around 700,000, being approximately 80 percent of the Arab inhabitants of what became Israel. About 250,000–300,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled during the 1947–1948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine, before the termination of the British Mandate on 14 May 1948. The desire to prevent the collapse of the Palestinians and to avoid more refugees were some of the reasons for the entry of the Arab League into the country, which began the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.

Anti-Zionism is opposition to Zionism. Although anti-Zionism is a heterogeneous phenomenon, all its proponents agree that the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and the movement to create a sovereign Jewish state in the region of Palestine—a region partly coinciding with the biblical Land of Israel—was flawed or unjust in some way.

Before World War II, opposition to Zionism was common among Jewish communities. Secular critics viewed Zionism as a form of nationalism inconsistent with Enlightenment universalism, while some Orthodox groups opposed it on theological grounds, regarding the establishment of a Jewish state as contingent upon the arrival of the Messiah. Support for Zionism increased during the 1930s as conditions for Jews rapidly deteriorated in Europe due to the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, and Zionism began to prevail over opposition to it in the Jewish diaspora. With the Second World War, the sheer scale of the Holocaust was felt and support for Zionism increased dramatically. After 1948, anti-Zionism shifted from opposition to the creation of a Jewish state to rejection of the existence of Israel itself, with many postwar movements advocating its replacement by an alternative political entity. Most Jewish anti-Zionist movements subsequently disintegrated or transformed into pro-Zionist organizations, although a minority, including the American Council for Judaism, continued to oppose the ideology. Outside the Jewish community, opposition to Zionism developed primarily among Arab populations, particularly among Palestinians, who associated it with the Nakba.

The Israeli Declaration of Independence, formally the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel (Hebrew: הכרזה על הקמת מדינת ישראל), was proclaimed on 14 May 1948 (5 Iyar 5708), at the end of the civil war phase and beginning of the international phase of the 1948 Palestine war, by David Ben-Gurion, the executive head of the World Zionist Organization and chairman of the Jewish Agency for Palestine.

It declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine (or the Land of Israel in the Jewish tradition), to be known as the State of Israel, which would come into effect on termination of the British Mandate at midnight that day. The event is celebrated annually in Israel as Independence Day, a national holiday on 5 Iyar of every year according to the Hebrew calendar. Palestinians view the declaration of independence as marking the start of the Nakba and commemorate it annually on May 15 as Nakba Day.

The Gaza–Israel conflict is a localized part of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict beginning in 1948, when about 200,000 of the more than 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes settled in the Gaza Strip as refugees. Since then, Israel and Palestinian militant groups have fought 15 wars in the Gaza Strip. The number of Palestinians killed in the Gaza war (ongoing since 2023) (70,000+) is higher than the combined death toll of all other wars in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Israel fought three wars in the Egyptian-administered Gaza Strip: 1948 Palestine War, the first occupation of Gaza during the Suez Crisis, and the capture of Gaza in 1967. During the first occupation, 1% of Gaza Strip's population was either killed, tortured or imprisoned by Israel. Following two periods of low-level insurgencies, a major conflict between Israelis and Palestinians erupted in the First Intifada. The 1993 Oslo Accords brought a period of calm. But, in 2000 the Second Intifada erupted. Towards the end of the Second Intifada, Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005, Hamas won the 2006 election and seized control of Gaza in 2007.

During the 1947–1949 Palestine war, or the Nakba, around 400 Palestinian Arab towns and villages were forcibly depopulated by Israeli forces, with a majority being destroyed and left uninhabitable. Today these locations are all in Israel; many of the locations were repopulated by Jewish immigrants, with their place names replaced with Hebrew place names.

Arabs remained in small numbers in some of the cities (Haifa, Jaffa and Acre); and Jerusalem was divided between Jordan and Israel. Around 30,000 Palestinians remained in Jerusalem in what became the Arab part of it (East Jerusalem). In addition, some 30,000 non-Jewish refugees relocated to East Jerusalem, while 5,000 Jewish refugees moved from the Old City to West Jerusalem on the Israeli side. An overwhelming number of the Arab residents who had lived in the cities that became a part of Israel and were renamed (Acre, Haifa, Safad, Tiberias, Ashkelon, Beersheba, Jaffa and Beisan) fled or were expelled. Most of the Palestinians who remain there are internally displaced people from the villages nearby.

Antisemitism (prejudice against and hatred of Jews) has increased greatly in the Arab world since the beginning of the 20th century, for several reasons: the dissolution and breakdown of the Ottoman Empire and traditional Islamic society; European influence, brought about by Western imperialism and Arab Christians; Nazi propaganda and relations between Nazi Germany and the Arab world; resentment over Zionism and the experience of the Nakba; the rise of Arab nationalism; and the widespread proliferation of anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist conspiracy theories.

Traditionally, Jews in the Muslim world were considered to be People of the Book and were subjected to dhimmi status. They were afforded relative security against persecution, provided they did not contest the varying inferior social and legal status imposed on them under Islamic rule.

Palestinians in Lebanon include the Palestinian refugees who fled to Lebanon during the Nakba, their descendants, the Palestinian militias which resided in Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s, and Palestinian nationals who moved to Lebanon from countries experiencing conflict, such as Syria. There are roughly 3,000 registered Palestinians and their descendants who hold no identification cards, including refugees of the 1967 Naksa. Many Palestinians in Lebanon are refugees and their descendants, who have been barred from naturalisation, retaining stateless refugee status. Palestinians in Lebanon, including children of Lebanese mothers and Palestinian fathers, face systemic discrimination, with limited access to employment and social services. While some Palestinian Christians, such as women who gained citizenship through marriage to Lebanese nationals, have been naturalized, the state continues to deny citizenship to others.

In 2017, a census by the Lebanese government counted 174,000 Palestinians in Lebanon. Estimates of the number of Palestinians in Lebanon ranged from 260,000 to 400,000 in 2011. Human Rights Watch estimated 300,000 in 2011. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) reported 489,292 registered Palestine refugees as of March 2023 but estimated that no more than 250,000 were then resident in Lebanon.