Is Israel’s current assault on Gaza worse than the 1948 Palestinian Nakba?

Seventy-six years ago, Zionist militias stormed Palestine, killing 15,000 Palestinians and violently expelling 750,000 more from their villages and lands to make way for the formation of Israel.

This is known as the Nakba - the "catastrophe" in Arabic, and many have tried to draw parallels between that historical trauma and the current assault Israel is waging on Gaza.

In 1948, more than 500 Palestinian villages were raided and destroyed by militia forces.

Those who remained would live under occupation - 420,000 in the West Bank, 80,000 in Gaza, and about 160,000 more within the newly established State of Israel.

"If, in 75 years time, the international community has still to realise what the 'Nakba' is, here's what it is – televised, under our watch," Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for Palestinian human rights, told reporters during the Gaza war atrocities in November last year.

Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza puts the number of dead around 35,589 and counting, but more than 10,000 people remain unaccounted for, buried under the rubble of collapsed buildings and infrastructure.

TRT World explains why this war has become Palestine’s “new Nakba.”

Why is it important to understand the first Nakba in 1948 to understand what is happening now?

“Because this didn't start on October 7, it started in 1948,” Darin Sallam, writer and director of the critically acclaimed film Farha (2021) tells TRT World.

“This is not a complicated conflict. This is not a religious conflict. It is not a war. It is an occupier and the occupied. It is an oppressor and the oppressed. It is a coloniser and the colonised, and that began in 1948.”

What similarities are there between the 1948 Nakba and the war today?

“The war crimes committed by Israel today are the same as 1948 and we are seeing repetitive patterns of barbarism and savagery,” Sallam said from her home in Jordan. Her family, victims themselves of the first Nakba, were forced to leave their home in Ramla, now part of Israel.

She’s been receiving messages from people watching scenes from Gaza unfold on their news and social media screens. They tell her they are the same shocking images they saw portrayed in Farha - set in an unnamed Palestinian village during the Nakba.

“Infants left to starve and die, children being killed in cold blood, murdering defenceless families, stealing jewellery and property, wiping out villages, and most recently how they announced via megaphones to leave the area to so-called ‘safe zones.’ It’s the same as 1948, but worse!”

Dr Ghada Karmi, a co-founder of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at Exeter University and a Nakba survivor, was just eight years old when she was forced to leave her family home in West Jerusalem’s affluent Katamon neighbourhood.

Her “friendly and calm” neighbourhood before 1948 became occupied by Zionist “snipers and militia.” Her family would become part of the 70 percent of Palestinians prohibited by the new state, Israel, from ever returning home.

“I remember there was fear everywhere, and it’s that same fear I’m seeing on the faces of the children in Gaza today,” she told TRT World.

At least 8,000 children are believed to have died since the war began, but many more could be trapped under the rubble, and others who do survive are often left without any surviving family members.

Sallam said one of the reasons she had wanted to tell the story of the Nakba through a 14-year-old girl's eyes in her film was to show how Palestinian kids are robbed of their childhoods, targeted and assassinated.

“It is just one story of a child who survived Nakba. In Gaza remember a child would have had to survive five wars to have made it to their 18th birthday.”

Is what we are seeing now worse than the Nakba?

It is in terms of the sheer level of loss of lives, displacement and destruction, Karmi said.

She recalled that when she was a child in Palestine, the Zionist paramilitary group Haganah had bombed the Semiramis Hotel that was located on the road just above her home, killing at least 20 people, including one child.

“I remember some of our windows shattering because of that explosion, but what is happening now is incomparable.”

Since the Israeli bombardment of Gaza began on October 7, more than 313,000 buildings have been pummelled, including schools and hospitals, along with family homes.

Meanwhile, Israel has been using a starvation campaign as a tool of subjugation since the beginning of its ongoing invasion of Gaza. This campaign includes bombing and destroying bakeries, factories, grocery stores, water stations, and tanks, in addition to cutting off all food supplies.

“This is worse in every way - the unprecedented starvation methods being used on Gazan civilians, the rising deaths, the numbers of those displaced with nowhere to actually go, and in such a small geographical area,” Karmi said, adding:

"The added tragedy is that 70 percent of Gazans were displaced from elsewhere in historic Palestine, because of the 1948 Nakba, and now they’re facing this again."

Why did Palestinians flee to neighbouring countries in 1948, but this time say they will not leave this time?

When Palestinians left in 1948, “there wasn’t an understanding of the consequences of what was about to follow,” said Mahjoob Zweiri, a contemporary history professor and Director of the Gulf Studies Center at Qatar University.

At the time, some 750,000 Palestinians who were forced to leave were taken in by Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt.

Sallam explains: “Nobody chose back then where to go, they barely escaped death.”

Her grandparents and her father, then a six-month-old baby, ended up in Jordan, with the hope of returning. “They took their keys with them and left everything behind, believing they would be back in a few weeks.”

But Sallam’s family home in Ramla was seized in a land grab by the Israeli state and given to Jewish settlers. The Sallam family, like thousands of others, still hang their home keys on the walls, waiting for the day to return.

“(Back) then the Arab states played a very important part by hosting refugees, they were really generous, but Palestinians are now more aware and realise once they leave that’s it – the reality is they have nowhere to go,” Karmi said.

This week 360,000 people, already displaced multiple times, were forced to flee from Gaza's southernmost city of Rafah, after Israeli military warned of a heightened offensive.

In early November, Israel ordered Palestinians to leave their homes in north Gaza. At least 100,000 did, carrying with them whatever their hands could manage. But there were thousands more who stayed, saying they had nowhere else to go.

“When faced with continued bombings and starvation, people flee, that’s a natural response, there’s only so much humans can endure,” Karmi said.

But both Egypt and Jordan have clearly stated they will not absorb Palestinian refugees again.

In 1948, the Arab states were just declaring independence and were but a few years old. “Now, they have their own socio-economic issues to deal with, and this time it’s not seen as their responsibility,” Zweiri said.

Just look at the displacement within Gaza itself, there are 1.9 million people, he said. Those who wanted to return to their homes in north Gaza weren’t even able to during the brief truce.

“It isn’t like last time, they know if they leave Palestine, they know they won’t be allowed back.”

Karmi’s own family moved to London where her father worked for the BBC Arabic service. She recalled that for the first five years there, her mother wouldn’t buy anything that suggested permanence, like a fridge. “She was convinced we would not be staying.”

Why has the world allowed for the situation to escalate into this?

“It’s a very, very, central question. Israel could never do any of this if it was not for the active support and the impunity granted to Western states,” Karmi said.

Israel remains among the top US military aid recipients – having received some $130 billion between 1946 and 2023. A recently leaked document listed the types of munition being sent to help support Israel’s relentless bombing campaign.

“Even now if the US says, ‘right, that’s it enough, no more arms, no more money’ – they (Israel) would stop immediately.”

Previously, it was Britain that provided military support in the form of protection and weapons to the Zionist movement of the 1940s.

But Karmi said what makes this Nakba worse is the Arab states, “which are standing by doing nothing, and that enables Israel.” She said more gestures like recalling ambassadors would be symbolic and show a level of support – “the message is clear as the Palestinians are on their own.”