Occupied East Jerusalem - Before Israel’s genocide in besieged Gaza, the 1948 Nakba - or ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist militia - marked the darkest chapter of violence and mass displacement Palestinians had endured, until now.
Today, nearly two years into Israel’s horrific war on Gaza, alongside a parallel military assault on the occupied West Bank, that history has been eclipsed.
The scale of Israel’s murder, destruction, and systemic repression has broken every precedent, plunging Palestinians into an entirely new and incomparably more devastating phase of Israeli occupation.
The suffering Palestinians endure now defies comparison with even the Nakba.
Over the past 19 months, Israel has transformed Gaza, once a vibrant coastal enclave of two million people, into the world’s largest extermination and concentration camp. Into hell on earth.
There are no words left to capture the horrors survivors of this genocide have endured: mass graves, mangled bodies of headless and limbless children, the screams of men, women, and children consumed by flames, deliberate starvation, the erasure of entire families and generations, the destruction of homes, schools, and hospitals.
Every trace of life is being wiped out.
This is not “collateral damage”. It is a calculated, organised campaign of extermination. It is industrialised, wholesale murder and destruction, carried out in partnership with the world’s most powerful governments and corporate blood profiteers.
From the United States and the United Kingdom to France, Germany, and Canada, Western governments have enabled and armed this onslaught.
Defence contractors like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, financial giants, and global tech and media companies all share culpability. Hundreds, if not thousands, of business owners and employees are making their paychecks from the spilling of Palestinian blood.
Israel is annexing the West Bank
In the occupied West Bank, Israeli occupation forces and illegal Jewish settlers kill, injure and arrest Palestinians daily with total impunity. For over a year and a half, more than three million Palestinians have lived under de facto lockdown.
Cities and villages are encircled by Israeli military closures, checkpoints and illegal settlements, each effectively turned into its own prison.
Israel has used the Gaza war as a cover to escalate its illegal annexation of the occupied West Bank. Decades of international complicity have enabled this moment: the forcible expulsion of dozens of Palestinian communities, the theft of unprecedented tracts of Palestinian land, the expansion of illegal settlements and outposts, and the demolition of Palestinian homes at record rates.
The theft of land no longer requires official Israeli military orders issued to landowners, but has been reduced to one armed Israeli settler who sets up a tent on a hill and takes over large swathes of land.
This is happening not only in Area C —60 percent of the occupied West Bank that is under the full control of the military and settlers — but increasingly in Area B, nominally under Palestinian Authority (PA) jurisdiction, as per the Oslo Accords. Palestinians are now confined to just 18 percent of the occupied West Bank, known as Area A. This is more than just an occupation, it’s annexation in real time.
Between November 1, 2023, to October 31, 2024, Israel stole a record 24,193 dunams (around 24.2 square kilometres) of land in the West Bank, equivalent to 18,300 football fields, and declared it as state land.
In that same period, it approved the building of over 30,000 new illegal apartments for settlers in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. In parallel, at least 49 new Israeli settler outposts were built, compared to an annual average of eight new ones over the past decade. Many of the outposts were built on the lands of forcibly expelled Palestinian villages, with at least 47 Palestinian villages in Area C of the West Bank completely emptied since October 7, 2023.
As Palestinians mark the 77th anniversary of the Nakba, the Israeli military is demolishing more than 100 residential buildings in the refugee camps of Nur Shams and Tulkarem, set up in the years after 1948.
More than 40,000 Palestinians from Jenin and Tulkarem remain displaced as their camps are reduced to rubble. Uninhabitable. Hundreds of heavily-armed soldiers, armored military vehicles, and bulldozers occupy city centres and refugee camps, terrorising residents and paralysing daily life. In February, the Israeli army announced it would remain in these areas for the coming year, rolling armoured tanks into Jenin city for the first time in 23 years.
It must be understood that what the millions of Palestinians in besieged Gaza, occupied East Jerusalem, and the occupied West Bank are enduring at the hands of Israel today is like nothing that has passed.
While the Nakba marked the start of dispossession, this moment reflects its most extreme expression yet.
Nakba Day is observed on May 15 ever since the Zionist militias invaded Palestine on this day in 1948 and expelled tens of thousands of people from their homes.
As one third of the total Palestinian population between the river and the sea is annihilated, displaced, and starved in Gaza. Palestine, in its historical and present form, is being erased.
And while the world grows numb to images of Palestinians being murdered in the ugliest of ways—particularly in Gaza—Palestinians understand all too well that, on the ground, they stand alone in confronting one of the most violent and enduring settler-colonial projects in modern history, just as they have for nearly a century.
