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The expulsions of Palestinian people from 1949 to 1956 were a continuation of the 1948 expulsion and flight from Israeli-controlled territory that occurred after the signing of the 1949 ceasefire agreements. [1] [2] [3] [4] This period of the exodus [5] was characterised predominantly by forced expulsion during the consolidation of the state of Israel and the growing tension along ceasefire lines that ultimately lead to the 1956 Suez Crisis. [6]
Between 1949 and 1950, according to historian Benny Morris, Israel displaced and expelled between 30,000 and 40,000 Palestinians and Bedouin. [7] Many villages along the ceasefire lines and the Lebanon border area were leveled, and many emptied villages were resettled by new Jewish immigrants and demobilized Israeli military forces. [8] [9]
Israel argued this was motivated by security considerations linked with the situation at the borders. During the consolidation period, Israel was more intent on gaining control of the demilitarized zones on the Syrian, Jordanian and Egyptian fronts than on its image abroad. [10] [11] [12] [13]
Immediately after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Israel began a process of nation-building; its first general elections were held on 25 January 1949. Chaim Weizmann was installed as Israel's first President, and David Ben-Gurion (head of the Mapai party ) attained the position of Prime minister of Israel that he had previously held in the provisional government. Ben-Gurion emphatically rejected the return of refugees in the Israeli Cabinet decision of June 1948. This position is reiterated in a letter to the UN of 2 August 1949 containing the text of a statement made by Moshe Sharett on 1 August 1948 where the basic attitude of the Israeli government was that a solution must be sought, not through the return of the refugees to Israel, but through the resettlement of the Palestinian Arab refugee population in other states. [14]
The Israeli government was of the view that the armistice agreements gave them three indisputable rights: [15]
The Arab nations conversely also saw the General Armistice Agreements as conferring three rights: [15]
Israeli security was conceptualized on two levels: general security and daily security. [16] General security covered the threat of invasion while daily security aimed to secure Israeli territory from infiltration. This was achieved by three processes: the transfer of Israeli Arabs away from the ceasefire lines to urban areas of concentration such as Jaffa and Haifa; the resettlement of the areas cleared along the ceasefire lines, mainly by Mizrahi Jews in moshavim; and operating a free fire policy. [17]
Once the fighting phase of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war had ceased with a truce, the Israeli bureaucracy was faced with the task of ruling over dozens of severely disrupted Israeli Arab villages and towns, where thousands of displaced Palestinians had taken refuge. Since the Israeli state did not trust its Israeli Arab citizens, seeing them as a potential fifth column, it placed this entire population under a tight military regime supervised by the Central Committee for Arab Affairs.[ citation needed ] Established in 1954, the committee had representatives from the police and the domestic intelligence agency, Shabak, as well as the prime minister's consultant for Arab affairs and the commander-in-chief of military rule. In concert, the committee presided over three regional sub-committees (south, center and north), which dealt with the daily business of governance.[ citation needed ]
The Registration of Residents ordinance of 1949 left unregistered Palestinian Arabs without legal status and vulnerable to deportation. The Abandoned Property law of 1950, where the moveable and immovable property belonging to the refugees was effectively appropriated by the state of Israel, applied not only to Palestinian refugees who had left Israeli territory but also to Palestinian Arabs who had remained in Israel but who had left their ordinary place of residence. One quarter of the Arab citizens of Israel are "internal refugees," who until 1948 resided in villages that were destroyed in the war. [18]
From 1949 to 1956, an estimated 90% of infiltration was motivated by social and economic concerns. [19] It was naturally difficult to prevent refugees who were living on a bare subsistence level from crossing lines beyond which they hoped to find fodder for their hungry sheep, or for scarce fuel. Additionally, occasional nightly clandestine smuggling occurred between Gaza and Hebron. The smuggling was largely motivated by the great discrepancy in prices between the two areas. [20] In 1950, most of these complaints concerned the shooting by Israelis of refugee civilians and livestock, said to have illegally crossed the demarcation lines. In the most serious case of this kind, Egypt complained that on the 7 and 14 October 1950, Israeli military forces shelled and machine-gunned the Arab villages of Abasan al-Kabira and Beit Hanoun in the Egyptian-controlled territory of the Gaza strip, killing seven civilians and the wounding twenty. Israel complained of infiltration incidents leading to the death of four Israeli settlers and the wounding of twenty others. [20]
The pejorative term 'infiltrator' was also applied to refugee non-residents who had not left Israel, as was the case in Nazareth. On 21 November 1949, the Arab member of the Knesset Mr. Amin Jarjura (Mapai) asked the Knesset permission for the 6,000 refugees of Nazareth to return to their surrounding villages; at the same time the IDF were conducting a sweep through the city of Nazareth, rounding up non-residents who the Jerusalem Post then termed infiltrators. [21]
The Israeli government claimed that as an extension of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Arab countries were aiding and abetting infiltrators by using them as guerillas. Some historians consider this claim inaccurate. [22]
The problem of establishing and guarding the demarcation line separating the Gaza Strip from the Israeli-held Negev area, proved a challenging one, largely due to the presence of more than 200,000 Palestinian Arab refugees in the Gaza area. [20] The terms of the Armistice Agreement restricted Egypt's use and deployment of regular armed forces in the Gaza strip. The Egyptian government circumvented this restriction by forming a Palestinian para-military police force, the Palestinian Border police, in December 1952. The Border police were placed under the command of ‘Abd-al-Man’imi ‘Abd-al-Ra’uf, a former Egyptian air brigade commander, member of the Muslim Brotherhood and member of the Revolutionary Council. 250 Palestinian volunteers started training in March 1953 with further volunteers coming forward for training in May and December 1953. Part of the Border police personnel were attached to the Military Governor’s office and placed under ‘Abd-al-‘Azim al-Saharti to guard public installations in the Gaza strip. [23]
To prevent future incidents caused by infiltration on the Egyptian ceasefire line and DMZ, the Mixed Armistice Commission finally decided that a system of mixed border patrols comprising officers and enlisted men from each side would decrease tension and lessen infiltration. Initially, the mixed patrols along the Egyptian demarcation line worked satisfactorily. [20] The Egyptian Authorities maintained a policy of "incarcerating" the inhabitants of the Gaza strip until 1955. [22]
The IDF adopted a free fire policy which included patrols, ambushes, laying mines, setting booby traps and carrying out periodic search operations in Israeli Arab villages. [24] The "free fire" policy in the period of 1949 to 1956 has been estimated to account for 2,700 to 5,000 Palestinian Arab deaths. [25] During anti-infiltration operations, Israeli forces committed atrocities including gang rape, murder and the dumping of 120 suspected infiltrators in the Avara desert without water. [24] [26] [27]
Additionally the IDF carried out operations, mainly in Jordanian-held territory and Egyptian-held territory. The early reprisal raids failed to achieve their objectives and managed to increase hatred for Israel amongst Arab countries and refugees.[ citation needed ] The disruptive and destabilizing nature of the raids put the Western plans for the defence of the Middle East in jeopardy, leading Western powers to apply pressure on Israeli to desist. [24]
From November 1948 through the summer of 1949 and the signing of the General Armistice Agreements, an additional 87 villages were occupied, 36 of which were emptied by force. [28]
According to statistics taken from the official records of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan/Israel Mixed Armistice Commission for the period of June 1949 through December 1952, Jordan complained of 37 instances of expulsion of Arabs from Israel. For the period 1 January 1953 through to 15 October 1953, Jordan complained of 7 instances of expulsion of Arabs from Israel involving 41 people. [29]
The Jewish National Fund under Yosef Weitz actively encouraged Palestinian Arab emigration. [30] In the village of Ar'ara 2,500 dunums (625 acres) were purchased. The purchase price was paid in Jordanian currency and the Palestinian Arabs were then transported to the ceasefire line with their luggage and from there transported to Tulkarem. [31]
During Operation Hiram in the upper Galilee, Israeli military commanders received the order: "Do all you can to immediately and quickly purge the conquered territories of all hostile elements in accordance with the orders issued. The residents should be helped to leave the areas that have been conquered." (31 October 1948, Moshe Carmel) The UN's acting Mediator, Ralph Bunche, reported that United Nations Observers recorded extensive looting of villages in Galilee by Israeli forces, which carried away goats, sheep and mules. This looting, United Nations Observers report, appeared to have been systematic as army trucks were used for transportation. The situation, states the report, created a new influx of refugees into Lebanon. Israeli forces, he stated, have occupied the area in Galilee formerly occupied by Kaukji's forces, and have crossed the Lebanese frontier. Bunche goes on to say "that Israeli forces now hold positions inside the south-east corner of Lebanon, involving some fifteen Lebanese villages which are occupied by small Israeli detachments". [32]
An example of the use of "rumours" is given where Glazer comments on the use of psychological warfare against civilians and quotes Nafez Nazzal's description of the Galilee exodus:
The villages of Ghuwayr Abu Shusha were persuaded by neighbouring Jewish Mukhtars to leave to Syria...The villagers heard how ruthless and cruel the Jews were to the people of Deir Yassin and the nearby village of Nasr ed Din. They [the villagers] were not prepared to withstand the Jewish attack and decided to accept their neighbours advice and leave. [33]
The method of planting false atrocity stories to engineer an exodus is borne out by Yigal Allon's Palmach plans to force the exodus of the Palestinian Arabs of Galilee:
The long battle had weaken our forces and before us stood great duties of blocking the routes of invasion. We therefore looked for means which did not force us into employing force, in order to cause the tens of thousands of sulky Arab who remained in the Galilee to flee, for in case of an Arab invasion they were likely to strike us in the rear. I gathered all the Jewish Mukhtars who had contact with Arabs in different villages, and asked to whisper in the ear of some Arabs that great Jewish reinforcements had arrived in Galilee and that it is going to burn all the villages of the Huleh. They should suggest to those Arabs, as a friend, to escape while there is still time. [33]
The villages of al Mansura, Tarbikha, Iqrit and Kafr Bir'im in Galilee were invaded by IDF forces during late October and early November 1948 after Operation Hiram. Because the villages were located in an area within 5 km of to the Israel-Lebanon border, they were to be evacuated of their Palestinian Arab population. [34] For security reasons, the Israeli forces wanted the villages populated primarily by Jews. [35] On 13 November 1948 the inhabitants of Kafr Bir'im were instructed by the IDF to "temporarily" evacuate in expectation of an Arab counter-attack. Emmanuel Friedman, an intelligence officer of the 7th Brigade, explained the evacuation orders to the villagers. The order was issued by Bechor Sheetrit. [36] The villagers of Kafr Bir'im initially sought protection in a nearby cave. Seeing the elderly, women and children living in the cave, the Minister of Police Bechor Sheetrit suggested that the villagers move further south to the town of Jish, where there were 400 abandoned houses, "until the military operations are over". Approximately 700 of the Kafr Bir'em villagers found accommodation within Israel, and the remaining 250 were encouraged to cross into Lebanon. [36] Archbishop Elias Chacour, originally a resident of Iqrit, relates in his autobiography how in the spring of 1949, the IDF rounded up all the men and older boys in the village (including his own father and three eldest brothers), and trucked them to the border with Jordan. There they were let out and ordered to go to Jordan. The soldiers opened fire, aiming just above their heads, meaning to drive them from their homeland for good. However, Chacour's father and brothers managed to return three months later. The operation to achieve a Palestinian Arab free Israel/Lebanon border zone came to an end on 15 16 November, leaving Fassuta (Christians), Jish (Maronites), Rihaniya (Circassians), Mi'ilya (Christians) and Jurdiye (Muslims) within the 5–7 km zone. [36] [37]
The first legal action against the state of Israel was brought in 1951 by 5 men of Iqrit with Muhammad Nimr al-Hawari acting as their lawyer. On 31 July 1951 the Israeli courts recognised the rights of the villagers to their land and their right to return to it. The court said the land was not abandoned and therefore could not be placed under the custodian of enemy property. [36]
In 1953 the (by now former) inhabitants of Kafr Bir'im pleaded to the Supreme Court of Israel to allow them to return to their village. Early in September 1953 the Supreme Court decided that the authorities had to answer to why the inhabitants were not allowed to return home. The result was devastating: on 16 September 1953 the Israeli air force and army in a joint operation bombed the village until it was completely destroyed. At the same time it was announced that 1,170 hectares of land belonging to the village had been expropriated by the state. [38]
On 16 January 1949, an attempt to move the remaining Palestinian Arab inhabitants of Tarshiha to the neighbouring towns of Mi'ilya and Majd al Kurum was prevented by UN and Christian clerical intercession. [39] Pressure from kibbutz and the military in the Galilee panhandle mounted to remove the Palestinian inhabitants of the area. On 5/6 June the inhabitants of Khisas and Qeitiya were forced into trucks and dumped near 'Akbara just south of Safad. [40]
In March 1949, as Iraqi forces withdrew from Palestine and handed over their positions to the smaller Jordanian legion, three Israeli brigades manoeuvred into threatening positions in Operation Shin-Tav-Shin in a form of coercive diplomacy. The operation allowed Israel to renegotiate the ceasefire line in the Wadi Ara area of the Northern West Bank in a secret agreement reached on 23 March 1949 and incorporated into the General Armistice Agreement. The Green Line was then redrawn in blue ink on the southern map to give the impression that a movement in the Green line had been made. However, this replacement involved a considerable change of the lines, a change which could not be carried out without inflicting serious hardships upon the population and the affected areas. It was inevitable that thousands of people, in the course of this redrawing of demarcation lines, were cut off from the fields that were their livelihood, cut off from their only resources of water and from the meager pastures on which they used to graze their cattle. [20] An estimated 15 villages were ceded to Israel and a further 15,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees. [41] [42]
During the Lausanne Peace Conference the US consul, William Burdett, reported on a meeting of the Jordan/Israel Armistice Commission which dealt with a case where 1,000 (UN estimates 1,500) Palestinian Arab inhabitants of Baqa al-Gharbiyye had been expelled and forced across the ceasefire line. [20] [43] The Mixed Armistice Commission decided, by majority vote, that Israel had violated the General Armistice Agreement by driving the civilians across the demarcation line into the territory of the Hashemite Jordan Kingdom. [20]
In January/February 1949 approximately 700 people from Kfar Yassif were expelled across the Jordanian/Israeli ceasefire line as they had moved into Kfar Yassif from the surrounding villages during the period of fighting in 1948. [44]
On 17 August 1950 the remaining Palestinian Arab population of Majdal were served with an expulsion order (The Palestinians had been held in a confined area since 1948) and the first group of them were taken on trucks to the Gaza Strip. Majdal was then renamed Ashkelon by the Israelis in an ongoing process of de-Arabisation of the topography as described by Meron Benvenisti. [45] Egypt accepted the expelled civilian Palestinian Arabs from Majdal on humanitarian grounds as they would otherwise have been exposed to "torture and death". That however did not mean their voluntary movement. Furthermore, testimony of the expelled Arabs and reports of the Mixed Armistice Commission clearly showed that the refugees had been forcibly expelled. [46]
Ilan Pappé reports that the last gun-point expulsion occurred in 1953 where the residents of Umm al-Faraj were driven out and the village destroyed by the IDF. " [47]
The expulsion at Wadi Fukin led to a change in the Green line where an exchange of fertile land in the Bethlehem area to Israeli control and the village of Wadi Fukin being given to Jordanian control. On 15 July when the Israeli Army expelled the population of Wadi Fukin after the village had been transferred to the Israeli-occupied area under the terms of the Armistice Agreement concluded between Israel and the Jordan Kingdom. The Mixed Armistice Commission decided on 31 August, by a majority vote, that Israel had violated the Armistice Agreement by expelling villagers of Wadi Fukin across the demarcation line and decided that the villagers should be allowed to return to their homes. However, when the villagers returned to Wadi Fukin under the supervision of the United Nations observers on 6 September, they found most of their houses destroyed and were again compelled by the Israeli Army to return to Jordanian controlled territory. The United Nations Chairman of the Mixed Commission, Colonel Garrison B. Coverdale (US), pressed for a solution of this issue to be found in the Mixed Armistice Commission, in an amicable and UN spirit. After some hesitation, an adjustment in the Green Line was accepted and finally an agreement was reached whereby the Armistice line was changed to give back Wadi Fukin to the Jordanian authority who, in turn, agreed to transfer some uninhabited, but fertile territory south of Bethlehem to the Israeli authority. [49]
Israeli forces attacked Jalbun village, with small arms, on the 5 December 1949, they then expelled the inhabitants from their village causing fatal casualties amongst the villagers. The Jordanian government strongly protested against unwarranted Israeli action and call on UN secretary General to notify the security council to take prompt and strict measures to return expelled Palestinians to their village, to hand back their looted belongings, and to compensate the villagers for all losses and damages. [50]
In the lake Huleh area, during 1951, Israel initiated a project to drain the marsh land to bring 15,000 acres (61 km2) into cultivation. The project caused a conflict of interests between the Palestinian Arab villages in the area, consequently 800 inhabitants of the villages were forcibly evacuated from the DMZ. [51] [52]
In 1954 Israel "evacuated" the Palestinian villages of Baqqara and Ghannama in the central sector of the Israel/Syria demilitarized zone the Chief of Staff of the UNTSO made a report in January 1955 to the United Nations where it was decided that: [53]
30 October 1956 When Israel attacked Egypt across the Sinai peninsula in co-ordination with an Anglo-French attack on Suez. The remainder of the Palestinians living in the DMZs were driven into Syria. The villages of Baqqara and Ghannama now lie as rubble and are empty.
According to the Jordanian minister of foreign affairs at the time, on 7 November 1949, Israeli forces expelled two thousand men, women, children from Beersheba area into the Jordanian controlled sector. Before the Palestinian Arabs were expelled they were severely maltreated, their homes destroyed, their cattle, sheep, belongings looted. [54]
20 August 1950 Israeli authorities expelled into Egyptian territory all the Bedouin living in the demilitarized zone of Auja al-Hafir in Palestine. United Nations observers found that thirteen Arabs, including women and children, had died during the exodus and bodies of several more had been found crushed by armoured vehicles. By 3 September, the number of expelled Arabs had reached 4,071. Most of them had lived in the Beersheba area of Palestine during the period of the British Mandate and was driven from their homes for the first time when the Israeli forces had occupied Beersheba. The Bedouin had gone to settle in Auja al-Hafir and had been living there for more than two years. The Bedouin made representation to return to el-Auja under United Nations protection. [46] [55]
From the signing of the General Armistice Agreements in 1949, Jordan and Egypt had complained on many occasions that Israel had been reducing the Arab population of the Negeb by driving Bedouins and even Arab villagers across the ceasefire lines into the Egyptian Sinai and the Jordanian held West Bank. Israel had been condemned by the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) in some instances but had taken no steps to allow the return of the Arabs. On 17 September 1952, the senior Jordan Military Delegate to the Mixed Armistice Commission, Major Itzaq, inform the MAC that the Israelis had expelled ten families of the es-Sani tribe and that they were now situated inside the Jordan border south of Hebron. On 22 September Commander Hutchison USNR of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan/Israel Mixed Armistice Commission (HKJMAC) went into the area and counted over 100 families, nearly 1,000 members of the es-Sani tribe. Sheikh El Hajj Ibrahim informed the MAC that the es-Sani had been forced off their cultivated lands southeast of Beersheba, at El Sharia, to El Laqiya, north-east of Beersheba. On the new area at El Laqiya, for the next three years the es-Sani had made it productive to the extent that Israel then declared a quantity of their grain as surplus crop and demanded that it be sold to the Israeli government at a fixed price. The Military Governor of Beersheba, Lt. Colonel Hermann, informed Sheikh El Hajj Ibrahim that Israel was going to establish a settlement at El Laqiya and that his tribe would have to move to Tel Arad. Sheikh El Hajj Ibrahim had then led the es-Sani over the Jordan/Israel ceasefire land rather that move to the inferior land around Tel Arad.
The Sheikh's story of the court action was true. On 28 September 1952, under the heading, * 'Bedouin Tribe Moved/' the Israel press announced that "Tribesmen of the Kiderat El Sana Teljaha tribe were last week moved from their former homes at El Laqiya, east of the Beersheba-Hebron road, to a new site at Tel Arad. ... On 15 September, the High Court in Jerusalem issued an order 'nisi* against the Military Governor and the Ministry of Defence against the enforced move of the tribe."
After negotiations lasting days it was arranged for the es-Sani to return to Israel; although the Israelis wanted the es-Sani transported inside Jordan to a point opposite and closer to Tel Arad which the Jordanians refused to do this and it was finally settled that the transfer would be made at the original point of crossing, on the Hebron-Beersheba road. [56]
In the first years of Israeli independence building up the state security and power was seen by Ben-Gurion as more important than political and media-orientated matter. He believed that Israel had to understand that if it wished to stabilise its position and realize Zionist goals, it could do so only from a position of strength, together with the accompanying risk of condemnation and confrontation with the international community.
Noting the complaint with regard to the evacuation of Arab residents from the demilitarized zone: (a) Decides that Arab civilians who have been removed from the demilitarized zone by the Government of Israel should be permitted to return forthwith to their homes and that the Mixed Armistice Commission should supervise their return and rehabilitation in a manner to be determined by the Commission; (b) Holds that no action involving the transfer of persons across international frontiers, across armistice lines or within the demilitarized zone should be undertaken without prior decision of the Chairman of the Mixed Armistice Commission.
The 1948 Arab–Israeli War, also known as the First Arab–Israeli War, followed the civil war in Mandatory Palestine as the second and final stage of the 1948 Palestine war. The civil war became a war of separate states with the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948, the end of the British Mandate for Palestine at midnight, and the entry of a military coalition of Arab states into the territory of Mandatory Palestine the following morning. The war formally ended with the 1949 Armistice Agreements which established the Green Line.
Palestinian refugees are citizens of Mandatory Palestine, and their descendants, who fled or were expelled from their country, village or house over the course of the 1948 Palestine war and during the 1967 Six-Day War. Most Palestinian refugees live in or near 68 Palestinian refugee camps across Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In 2019 more than 5.6 million Palestinian refugees were registered with the United Nations.
The Qibya massacre occurred during Operation Shoshana, an Israeli so-called reprisal operation that occurred in October 1953, when IDF's Unit 101 led by future Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon attacked the village of Qibya in the West Bank, which was then under Jordanian control, and killed more than sixty-nine Palestinian civilians, two-thirds of whom were women and children.
The 1949 Armistice Agreements were signed between Israel and Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. They formally ended the hostilities of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War and also demarcated the Green Line, which separated Arab-controlled territory from Israel until the latter's victory in the 1967 Arab–Israeli War.
Operation Hiram was a military operation conducted by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. It was led by General Moshe Carmel, and aimed at capturing the Upper Galilee region from the Arab Liberation Army (ALA) forces led by Fawzi al-Qawuqji and a Syrian battalion. The operation, which lasted 60 hours, ended just before the ceasefire with the neighboring Arab countries went into effect.
The 1949 Armistice Agreements, which ended the 1948 Arab–Israeli War by delineating the Green Line as the legal boundary between Israel and the Arab countries, left the Kingdom of Egypt in control of a small swath of territory that it had captured and occupied in the former British Mandate for Palestine: the Gaza Strip. This period saw the creation of the All-Palestine Government within the All-Palestine Protectorate, an Egyptian client state that lasted until 1959, a year after the Republic of Egypt and the Second Syrian Republic merged to form a single sovereign state known as the United Arab Republic. The Egyptian occupation of the Gaza Strip was briefly subsumed by Israel during the 1956 Suez Crisis and ended entirely during the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, after which the territory became occupied by Israel with the establishment of the Israeli Military Governorate.
The Green Line, or 1949 Armistice border, is the demarcation line set out in the 1949 Armistice Agreements between the armies of Israel and those of its neighbors after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. It served as the de facto borders of the State of Israel from 1949 until the Six-Day War in 1967, and continues to represent Israel's internationally recognized borders with the two Palestinian territories: the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
al-Faluja was a Palestinian Arab village in the British Mandate for Palestine, located 30 kilometers northeast of Gaza City. Al-Faluja absorbed settlers from various areas, including Dura.
The Palestinian right of return is the political position or principle that Palestinian refugees, both first-generation refugees and their descendants, have a right to return and a right to the property they themselves or their forebears left behind or were forced to leave in what is now Israel and the Palestinian territories during the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight and the 1967 Six-Day War.
During the 1948 Palestine war in which the State of Israel was established, around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs, or 85% of the total population of the territory Israel captured, were expelled or fled from their homes. The causes of this mass displacement have been a matter of dispute, though today most scholars consider that the majority of Palestinians were directly expelled or else fled due to fear.
The Prevention of Infiltration Law is a 1954 Israeli law that deals with the offense of unauthorized entry by armed and unarmed foreigners into Israel. It authorizes the Minister of Defense to order the immediate deportation of any detained infiltrator before or after their conviction.
The Eilabun massacre was committed on 30 October 1948 by the Israeli Defense Forces as part of the 1948 Palestine war. A total of 14 men from the Arab Christian village of Eilabun were killed, 12 of them executed by the Israeli forces after the village had surrendered. The remaining villagers were expelled to Lebanon, living as refugees for some months before being allowed to return in 1949 as part of an agreement between the state of Israel and Archbishop Maximos V Hakim.
In July 1948, during the 1948 Palestine war, the Palestinian towns of Lydda and Ramle were captured by the Israeli Defense Forces and their residents were violently expelled. The expulsions occurred as part of the broader 1948 Palestinian expulsions and the Nakba. Hundreds of Palestinians were killed in multiple mass killings, including the Lydda massacre and the Lydda Death March. The two Arab towns, lying outside the area designated for a Jewish state in the UN Partition Plan of 1947, and inside the area set aside for an Arab state in Palestine, were subsequently incorporated into the new State of Israel and repopulated with Jewish immigrants. The towns today have the Hebrew names of Lod and Ramla.
Kirad al-Ghannama was a Palestinian Arab village in the Safad Subdistrict. It was depopulated during the 1947–1948 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine on April 22, 1948, by the Palmach's First Battalion of Operation Yiftach. It was located 11 km northeast of Safad. Wadi Mushayrifa ran between the two Kirad villages and Wadi Waqqas supplied the village with its water requirements. The village contained the following khirbas: Khirbat Nijmat al-Subh, Tall al-Qadah, and Tall al-Safa.
Kirad al-Baqqara was a Palestinian Arab village in the Safad Subdistrict. It was depopulated during the 1947–1948 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine on April 22, 1948, by the Palmach's First Battalion of Operation Yiftach. It was located 11 km northwest of Safad and Wadi Mushayrifa ran between the two Kirad villages.
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, at first by Zionist paramilitaries, and after the establishment of Israel, by its military. 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 and properties were looted to prevent Palestinian refugees from returning. Other sites were subject to Hebraization of Palestinian place names.
The Azazima or Azazme/ 'Azazmeh/al-Azazmeh are a Bedouin tribe whose grazing territory used to be the desert around the wells at El Auja and Bir Ain on the border between Israel and Egypt.
The Palestinian Fedayeen insurgency was an armed cross-border conflict, which peaked between 1949 and 1956, involving Israel and Palestinian militants, mainly based in the Gaza Strip, under the nominal control of the All-Palestine Protectorate – a Palestinian client-state of Egypt declared in October 1948, which became the focal point of the Palestinian fedayeen activity. The conflict was parallel to the Palestinian infiltration phenomenon. Hundreds were killed in the course of the conflict, which declined after the 1956 Suez War.
The 1948 Palestine war was fought in the territory of what had been, at the start of the war, British-ruled Mandatory Palestine. During the war, the British withdrew from Palestine, Zionist forces conquered territory and established the State of Israel, and over 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled. It was the first war of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the broader Arab–Israeli conflict.
The Nakba is the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs through their violent displacement and dispossession of land, property, and belongings, along with the destruction of their society and the suppression of their culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations. The term is used to describe the events of the 1948 Palestine war in Mandatory Palestine as well as the ongoing persecution and displacement of Palestinians by Israel. As a whole, it covers the fracturing of Palestinian society and the long-running rejection of the right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants.