At least 40 children killed in Sudan over three days: UNICEF

JERUSALEM: Palestinians will mark this year the 77th anniversary of their mass expulsion from what is now Israel, an event that is at the core of their national struggle.

But in many ways, that experience pales in comparison to the calamity now faced in the Gaza Strip — particularly as President Donald Trump has suggested that displaced Palestinians in Gaza be permanently resettled outside the war-torn territory and that the US take “ownership” of the enclave.

Palestinians refer to their 1948 expulsion as the Nakba, Arabic for catastrophe. Some 700,000 Palestinians — a majority of the prewar population — fled or were driven from their homes before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that followed Israel’s establishment.

After the war, Israel refused to allow them to return because it would have resulted in a Palestinian majority within its borders. 

Instead, they became a seemingly permanent refugee community that now numbers some 6 million, with most living in slum-like urban refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Israel’s rejection of what Palestinians say is their right of return to their 1948 homes has been a core grievance in the conflict and was one of the thorniest issues in peace talks that last collapsed 15 years ago. The refugee camps have always been the main bastions of Palestinian militancy.

Now, many Palestinians fear a repeat of their painful history on an even more cataclysmic scale.

All across Gaza, Palestinians in recent days have been loading up cars and donkey carts or setting out on foot to visit their destroyed homes after a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war took hold Jan. 19. The images from several rounds of mass evacuations throughout the war — and their march back north on foot — are strikingly similar to black-and-white photographs from 1948.

Mustafa Al-Gazzar, in his 80s, recalled in 2024 his family’s monthslong flight from their village in what is now central Israel to the southern city of Rafah, when he was 5. At one point they were bombed from the air, at another, they dug holes under a tree to sleep in for warmth.

Al-Gazzar, now a great-grandfather, was forced to flee again in the war, this time to a tent in Muwasi, a barren coastal area where some 450,000 Palestinians live in a squalid camp. 

He said then the conditions are worse than in 1948, when the UN agency for Palestinian refugees was able to regularly provide food and other essentials.

The war in Gaza has forced some 1.7 million Palestinians — around three quarters of the territory’s population — to flee their homes, often multiple times. That is well over twice the number that fled before and during the 1948 war.

Israel has sealed its border. Egypt has only allowed a small number of Palestinians to leave, in part because it fears a mass influx of Palestinians could generate another long-term refugee crisis.

Israel has long called for the refugees of 1948 to be absorbed into host countries, saying that calls for their return are unrealistic and would endanger its existence as a Jewish-majority state. It points to the hundreds of thousands of Jews who came to Israel from Arab countries during the turmoil following its establishment, though few of them want to return.

Even if Palestinians are not expelled from Gaza en masse, many fear that they will never be able to return to their homes or that the destruction wreaked on the territory will make it impossible to live there. One UN estimate said it would take until 2040 to rebuild destroyed homes.

Yara Asi, a Palestinian professor at the University of Central Florida, says it’s “extremely difficult” to imagine the kind of international effort that would be necessary to rebuild Gaza.

TEHRAN: Iran’s currency plunged on Wednesday to a record low of 850,000 rials to $1 after US President Donald Trump ordered a restart to the “maximum pressure” campaign targeting Tehran.

Trump’s order calls for halting Iran’s oil exports and pursuing a “snapback” of UN sanctions on Iran. However, he also suggested he didn’t want to impose those sanctions and wanted to reach a deal with Iran.

The move comes as Trump’s moves to freeze spending on foreign aid and overhaul, or even end, the US Agency for International Development have been lauded in Iranian state media.

Meanwhile, ordinary Iranians worry what all this could mean for them.

“It encourages hard-liners inside Iran to continue repressions because they feel the US would have less capability in supporting Iranian people who seek freedom,” said Maryam Faraji, a 27-year-old waitress in a coffee shop in northern Tehran.

Iranian media say Trump’s cuts could stop the opposition in Iran

The state-run IRNA news agency said that “cutting the budget of foreign-based opposition” could “affect the sphere of relations” between Tehran and Washington.

Newspapers, like the conservative Hamshhari daily, described Iran’s opposition as “counterrevolutionaries” who had been “celebrating” Trump’s election as heralding the “last days of life of the Islamic Republic.”

They then “suddenly faced the surprise of cut funding from their employer,” the newspaper crowed.

Even the reformist newspaper Hammihan compared it to a “cold shower” for opponents of Iran’s theocracy abroad, an idea also expressed by the Foreign Ministry.

“Those financial resources are not charity donations,” Esmail Bagahei, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, said during a briefing with reporters. “They are wages paid in exchange for services.”

It remains unclear how funding for Iranian activists and opposition figures would be affected by the USAID decision.

The lion’s share of money for civil society in Iran has come through the US State Department’s Near East Regional Democracy fund, known by the acronym NERD, which grew as an American response to the Green Movement protests in 2009.