Why Gaza Is Home to So Many Palestinian Refugees

For Palestinians, the day after Israel declared independence in 1948 is referred to as the “Nakba,” the Arabic word for disaster. It marked the start of a war in which some 700,000 Arabs were expelled from or fled their homes as the new state was established on what had been British-ruled Palestine. Many of the refugees wound up in the Gaza Strip, from which the Islamist group Hamas, considered a terrorist organization by the US and European Union, attacked Israel Oct. 7, provoking a new war. The refugees from the 1940s who are still living plus their descendants make up about 81% of Gaza’s 2.1 million people. They are all counted as refugees today because no permanent solution for them has been found. For more than 70 years, displaced Palestinians have claimed a “right of return” to what is now Israel, a position Israel rejects.

A war between Arabs and Jews broke out after the UN General Assembly voted on Nov. 29, 1947, to partition what was then called British Mandatory Palestine into two states. (The UK had assumed control of the territory from the Ottoman Empire after its defeat in World War I.) When Israel announced its independence on May 14, 1948, the surrounding Arab states — Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, with support from Iraq and Persian Gulf states — declared war on the budding Jewish state. Palestinians fled or were expelled in several waves over the course of a year, with some leaving in the belief that they could come back once the fighting ended. After the war, Israel destroyed hundreds of Palestinian villages and passed an Absentees’ Property Law that authorized the government to confiscate land and houses abandoned by Palestinians.