Al Nakba (“The Catastrophe” in English), or what Israel refers to as the “War of Independence,” symbolizes the dispossession, displacement, and uprooting of more than 750,000 Palestinian men, women, and children by numerically superior Israeli forces – half before any Arab armies joined the actual war. These Palestinians were driven into 59 refugee camps hastily constructed to accommodate them by UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency).
By the end of this removal campaign, Israeli forces had destroyed and/or dispossessed the populations of 531 Arab villages and eleven urban areas, and had committed 33 documented massacres which killed some 13,000 largely defenseless Arabs. One of the most well known of these massacres was the Deir Yassin massacre where over 100 people, half of them women and children, had been systematically murdered by the commandos of the Irgun, headed by Menachem Begin, and the Stern Gang.
A list of villages that were depopulated and destroyed: [x]
