MIDDLE EAST / FILE: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas marks Nakba Day, or 'day of catastrophe', recalling the displacement of Palestinians in 1948

Record ID: 858847

  • Title: MIDDLE EAST / FILE: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas marks Nakba Day, or 'day of catastrophe', recalling the displacement of Palestinians in 1948
  • Date: 16th May 2012
  • Summary: ISRAELI POLICE STOPPING PALESTINIAN CHILD
  • Embargoed: 31st May 2012 13:00
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  • Topics: International Relations,History
  • Reuters ID: LVAEAWSWE4JWXLP2W71KWT5ZM32O
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  • Story Text: Palestinians marked Nakba Day on Tuesday (May 15), commemorating 64 years since their loss of land and displacement.
    Shops in Ramallah were closed in a mass strike movement and black flags were hanging above the city's streets to mark the right of return.
    In a national address which aired the night before (May 14), Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said the day unites all Palestinians.
    "Today, all of our people unite to commemorate the Nakba, which displaced our people and they continue to suffer as a result. Every Palestinian, men and women, (suffer) whether living under occupation or in the refugee camps," he said.
    Nakba Day, commemorated annually on May 15, is traditionally marked by protests across the Palestinian territories. Rallies throughout the occupied Palestinian territories and in Israeli-Arab towns will be held to mourn the displacement and dispossession of Palestinians.
    In East Jerusalem, Israeli border police clashed with stone-throwing youths on the streets of the Issawiya neighbourhood.
    Some 700,000 people fled or were driven from their homes when Israel was created after the 1948 war, but now as many as five million refugees and their descendants live in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, many of them in squalid camps.
    Abu Rizik, a 75-year-old resident of Ramallah, recalled being forced to flee from his home in Jaffa.
    "I remember the suffering that we had gone through as they (Jewish militias) were throwing bombs and firing shells at us. We used to have a huge home and my father brought in goods while there was a war. He took a tank from the fighters and he placed the goods in it and hid the goods at home, I was young then. We put sand bags all the way up to the roof so that the Jews would have trouble entering (our house)," he said, adding that he remains hopeful that he may one day return to his land if not his specific home which has since been demolished.
    Rizik's youngest son is a prisoner in Israel jail and he wept for his granddaughter whose picture he carries along with his prisoner son being held without charges at Ofer military camp.
    Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails agreed on Monday to an Egyptian-brokered deal aimed at ending a mass hunger strike that challenged Israel's policy of detention without trial and raised fears of a bloody Palestinian backlash if any protesters died.
    Most of some 1,600 prisoners, a third of the 4,800 Palestinians in Israeli jails, began refusing food on April 17 although a few had been fasting much longer - up to 77 days. Their protest centred on demands for more family visits, an end to solitary confinement and an end to so-called "administrative detention", a practice that has drawn international criticism on human rights grounds.
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