This is the Palestinian Nakba, measured in land taken | By the Numbers

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]In early 1948, Palestinians owned almost nine times more land than Jews in Palestine. Within 2 years, that Jewish minority, 6% of the population had taken 78% of the country. This is the Palestinian Nagba, measured in land taken. Before the Nagba, Palestinians owned about 13,000 km and Jews owned 1500 km. In November 1947, the UN partition plan handed the future Jewish state 55% of Palestine, even though Jews were only onethird of the population and most were recent European immigrants.

[00:00:36]Then came the war. Zionist forces carried out 31 military operations and at least 70 massacres. By the 1949 armistice, Israel had taken 78% of historic Palestine. More than 750,000 Palestinians had been pushed out and 530 villages and towns lay empty. This property owned by Palestinians who were still alive became property of a new state. In 1950, Israel passed the absentes property law. It defined any Palestinian who left their home after November 1947 as an absentee. Even Palestinians who never left the country were called present absentees. Their property was transferred to the Jewish National Fund. By 1954, more than 10,000 Palestinian shops, 5,000 buildings, and nearly 60% of the country's fertile land had been reallocated this way. Around 70% of the state's territory may have a Palestinian claimant. And it wasn't just land. On June 20th, 1948, Israel ordered every bank in the country to freeze the accounts of Palestinian customers. More than $24 million was locked up overnight, worth more than $300 million today. Palestinian researcher Salman Abu Sida found that about 80% of the land of those destroyed villages is still uninhabited today. It's open ground, forest or farmland. Palestinian historians draw the same conclusion. The Nagba wasn't a war for living space. It was a war to engineer a state with a Jewish majority. And in 2026, the same playbook is being used. In February 2026, Israel's cabinet approved a land registration mechanism for the occupied West Bank. Any plot a Palestinian can't document on paper can now be claimed by the state. It is the same method that swallowed Palestinian property in 1948.

[00:02:31]A record 54 illegal Israeli settlements were approved in 2025.

[00:02:37]In Gaza, where most refugees from 1948 ended up, 86% of the farmland and 81% of buildings had been damaged or destroyed.

[00:02:46]Israel calls all of this state land. For Palestinians, almost eight decades after the Nagba, the numbers don't add up.