In Gaza, is Palestinian history repeating itself?

As he focuses on surviving 2024, Mohammed Lubbad cannot get another date out of his mind: 1948.

Sitting outside his house in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, which is now home to dozens of his displaced relatives, Abu Ayman, as he is known to family and friends, says he feels history repeating itself.

“I never imagined that I would live through two nakbas, one when I was really young and another in front of the eyes of the entire world,” he says, using the Arabic word for “catastrophe” by which Palestinians refer to their mass displacement 75 years ago.

Survivors of the 1948 Nakba say that as they are forced again from their homes, this time by Israeli airstrikes and starvation, they are reliving a past trauma and fear they will be driven from Gaza entirely.

With the Gaza death toll topping 30,000 and famine warnings in northern Gaza, Palestinians cannot help but recall the violence preceding and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that drove an estimated 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and into refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. 

Israelis mark the 1948 war as one of independence, against attacking Arab armies and Palestinian fighters. Palestinians view the conflict as a systematic campaign by Jewish militias to terrorize Palestinian civilians and drive them from their lands.

The Nakba has always reverberated strongly among Palestinians, but particularly in the Gaza Strip. Prior to the current conflict, 71% of residents were refugees whose families had been displaced into the strip by the 1948 war and then the 1967 Six-Day War.

Multigenerational families lived in United Nations-run refugee camps from the 1950s until the current war emptied camps in Gaza City and Khan Yunis. 

What it means to be afraid

Abeer al-Haddad, like many Palestinians, was familiar with tales of the Nakba from her parents and school history books. But like most people in Gaza, she never believed that one day she might witness similar events.

“Never had I imagined I would live this,” says Ms. Haddad, a cousin of this correspondent. She and her husband and children left their home in Al Shati refugee camp on Oct. 13 under bombardment and an Israeli evacuation order. They now live in a shelter in Deir al-Balah. “Now, I understand what it means to be afraid all the time,” she says. “To leave our hometown under fire.”

Her mother, Hamda al-Haddad, was only 2 years old when she and her family were displaced from Beit Daras, a Palestinian farming village 20 miles northeast of Gaza, amid the depopulation of 500 Palestinian towns and villages in 1948.

When violence encroached on the village, her father told the family to take only light luggage and the key to their house, according to family lore passed down through generations. They would be returning home in a couple of days, he added.

But they never returned home. After several moves, her family finally settled in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza.

When she married, the elder Ms. Haddad moved to her new husband’s home in the Khan Yunis refugee camp. She lived there for seven decades, a proud, aging matriarch, until a fierce Israeli offensive last January forced her to flee with several of her children and grandchildren. They joined the 1.7 million Gaza residents who have endured a similar fate over the past five months of fighting.

Hastily, they gathered some belongings and first moved to a school in the refugee camp run by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, believing that the U.N. flag would protect them. 

“I honestly thought it was only going to be for two days and that we would return to our house. I repeated my father’s very words” that he said during the Nakba, Ms. Haddad says.

Beyond a nakba?

When Israeli tanks rolled in and shelled the UNRWA school, Ms. Haddad, her two sons, their wives, and her grandchildren left Khan Yunis through a safe corridor, heading to the outskirts of Rafah. The grandmother hobbled the length of the rubble-strewn, 3-mile journey leaning on her cane.

“I feel this is another nakba. Then I stop and think for a while and say no, it is beyond a nakba,” says Abu Ayman.

Israeli troops “have burned Gaza,” he says. In 1948, news of Jewish militias reportedly killing people in other villages reached families like Abu Ayman’s “and we immediately left,” without encountering violence.

At the age of 4, Abu Ayman and his family left Al Majdal, now the Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon, where his father had worked as a farmer. They went to Gaza City and finally settled in central Gaza. He has six sons, two daughters, and 24 grandchildren, none of whom have ever seen their ancestral home.

“I wish I could return to my homeland,” Abu Ayman says with a sigh. “A person without a homeland has no value.”

Another elder, octogenarian Abu Kifah Qudieh, remembers as a small boy watching the arrival of tens of thousands of refugees who flowed into Gaza in 1948.

“This war is a different story. In the past, we had somewhere to stay, with food and necessities available. Now, we struggle even to find clean drinking water,” says Mr. Qudieh, who has shared a 20-square-foot tent with his wife and four grandchildren in Deir al-Balah since evacuating their home in southern Gaza.

Mr. Qudieh has also shared with his grandchildren stories of the Nakba refugees’ arrival in Gaza.

“They left behind their homes, their crops, and their livestock in their original villages. They arrived here with nothing,” he recalls. “And there is no going back.”

Feeding fears

The severity of the current conflict, threatening Gaza Palestinians with missile strikes and tank shells wherever they go, has led many people here to conclude that the war is not between Israel and Hamas, but a war on Palestinian civilians.

Israel’s aim, some believe, is to drive them from the besieged strip completely.

“People may think that this war is against Hamas. It is against us,” Abu Ayman argues. “The first war [in 1948] was to displace Palestinians from our own villages. This time [the war’s goal] is to displace us from Gaza.”

Feeding Palestinians’ fears, far-right Israeli politicians and senior Cabinet officials have made inflammatory threats. Israeli Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter, a security Cabinet member, described the war in November as “rolling out the Gaza nakba.”

“Gaza nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end,” the Likud party minister told Israel’s Channel 12 when asked about military plans – a comment that prompted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to urge his Cabinet members to be “sensitive” in choosing their words. The Israeli government denies it intends to carry out a nakba.

Nakba veterans have a common hope for future generations, but it is a hope they say is fading.

“I had hoped to live to witness a future of safety, free from war,” says Abu Ayman. “It saddens me to see my children and grandchildren experiencing what we endured.”

“I want them to have a brighter future than mine,” Ms. Haddad says of her grandchildren. “But I fear that they will never be able to return to their homes [in Gaza], just as we haven’t been able to. I am afraid Palestine will become a distant memory.”