Each year on May 15, Palestinians commemorate Nakba Day. The term “Nakba,” Arabic for “catastrophe,” refers to the events in and around 1948, when Zionist militias, followed by the newly established Israeli military, forcibly expelled approximately 800,000 indigenous Palestinians from their ancestral homes and lands, killed more than 15,000 Palestinians, and destroyed 531 Palestinian villages and towns.
Today, as the world bears witness to the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the deepening entrenchment of Israel’s settler-colonial apartheid regime across historic Palestine, it is clearer than ever that the Nakba is not an event confined to the past—it is ongoing, and unfolding in its most brutal phase. Since 7 October 2023, Israel has killed at least 52,908 Palestinians in occupied Gaza, including 16,270 children; wounded more than 119,000; and forcibly displaced nearly 2 million Palestinians. Thousands remain buried beneath the rubble, their deaths unrecorded.[1] Much of Gaza lies in ruins, with hospitals, schools, universities, and life-sustaining infrastructure destroyed or severely damaged. Entire families and communities have been wiped out. Since 2 March 2025, Israel has blocked the entry of water, food, medicines, and other aid supplies into Gaza, causing a man-made famine. In less than two years, Israel has inflicted a scale of devastation that surpasses even the horrors of the 1948 Nakba.
In the occupied West Bank, Israel is accelerating its settler-colonial annexationist agenda while carrying out military operations that mirror tactics used in Gaza, including mass forced displacement, sieges, and airstrikes—particularly in the Jenin and Nur Shams refugee camps. State-backed settler violence has reached record levels. At the same time, Palestinian citizens of Israel are subjected to systematic state persecution aimed at erasing their identity. Israel is also detaining a record number of Palestinians—more than at any point in its history.
As we mark the 77th annual commemoration of the Nakba, the Palestinian people continue to live it. In Gaza, the shadow of a new mass expulsion looms, threatening a population of 2.3 million Palestinians, of whom 70 percent are already refugees still denied their inalienable right of return by Israel for more than seven decades. On 5 May 2025, the Israeli security cabinet unanimously approved a plan to escalate military operations in Gaza, with the stated goals of permanently taking over the territory, forcibly transferring Palestinians to southern Gaza, close to the border with Egypt, and potentially expelling them outside of Palestine.
This plan blatantly reveals that the ongoing genocide in Gaza reflects the same settler-colonial logic that drove the Nakba of 1948: to displace, erase, and dominate. This plan also exposes the underlying objective behind Israel’s actions, in which the forcible displacement and transfer of Palestinians, along with the permanent seizure of Gaza, represent the latest phase of a long-standing project aimed at erasing the Palestinian people and removing them from their land. Today's deliberate targeting of Palestinian lives and identity is an attempt to complete what was started in 1948.
Our latest collaboration with Visualizing Palestine highlights the colonial isolation of Gaza, when the “Gaza Strip” was created as a result of the 1948 Nakba. The visual illustrates how Gaza’s territory has been reshaped over time, from the British Mandate of Palestine to the present day. This visual also serves to reaffirm that Gaza belongs to the Palestinian people, who hold an inalienable right to self-determination and to live in freedom and dignity on their ancestral land.
Just like in 1948, today, the international response to the violations being inflicted on the Palestinian people remains grossly inadequate. Israel has repeatedly demonstrated its disdain for the international legal order by deliberately ignoring resolutions from the United Nations (UN) Security Council, the General Assembly, and the Human Rights Council, as well as the legally binding provisional measures issued by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the case of South Africa v. Israel. Yet the international community has failed to enforce any of these measures. This persistent failure to pursue and implement meaningful accountability is what enables Israel’s belief that it can act with impunity. That failure is most evident among Western powers, first and foremost the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the European Union and its member states, which continue to provide Israel with political, military, and diplomatic cover despite overwhelming evidence of grave breaches of international law being committed.
Al Mezan underscores that the international community’s failure to hold Israel accountable has emboldened its ongoing atrocities. This sustained impunity was also instrumental in allowing the ongoing Nakba to continue for 77 years, with its most brutal phase now unfolding in Gaza.
The international community must cease absolving Israel of its responsibilities as an occupying power. Al Mezan urges the international community to demand Israeli authorities immediately and permanently open all Gaza’s crossings and ensure the flow of aid and resources. What is urgently needed now are not more expressions of concern, but concrete actions: targeted sanctions on Israeli officials and institutions responsible for grave violations of international law; the revision and suspension of diplomatic and economic relations with Israel, including EU-Israel Association Agreement; and a comprehensive two-way arms embargo to stop supplying Israel with the weapons used to kill and maim Palestinians. The implementation of International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants must follow without delay, excuse, or exception.
Accountability and justice are imperative not only for breaking cycles of violence but also as guarantees of non-repetition, ensuring that Israel's systemic human rights abuses against the Palestinian people are definitively brought to an end. The international community can no longer turn a blind eye to addressing the root causes of Israel's genocide in Gaza, specifically Israel’s settler-colonial apartheid regime and the ongoing Nakba endured by the Palestinian people.
[1] Al Mezan reminds that the official death toll accounts only for those killed by direct force, likely leaving tens of thousands more deaths unaccounted for.
