Yesterday was Nakba Day. May 15, 2026. The 78th Anniversary of the mass displacement and ethnic cleansing, when over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their home, more than 500 villages were destroyed, and an entire people were scattered across the world. Palestinians marched through Ramallah carrying big banners and symbolic keys. A 78-second siren sounded from mosques across the West Bank, one second for each year. The mother of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old girl killed in a car surrounded by Israeli tanks in January 2024, gave testimony at the United Nations in New York.
In Gaza, at least seven Palestinians were killed in two Israeli airstrikes on a residential building and a civilian vehicle in the Rimal district of Gaza City. Three women and a child were among those killed. The building had been sheltering hundreds of displaced individuals who had evacuated from eastern Gaza City, which had previously been cleared by multiple Israeli military operations. No warning was issued. Mahmoud Basel, Gaza’s civil defense spokesperson, told Reuters that “The missile was fired without any pre-warning or notification. We are talking about a number of dead. We are talking about a big number of wounded, among them families.”
This is not a coincidence of timing. This is the Nakba, still happening.
What the Nakba was
From late 1947 to 1949, the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi militias, and later the Israeli military, expelled approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and homeland, killing over 13,000 people, destroying over 500 towns and villages, and resulting in the world’s largest and longest-running refugee crisis. Many of the survivors were confined to what is now Gaza. Today, roughly 75% of Gaza’s population is made up of refugees or descendants of refugees from 1948. They didn’t end up in Gaza by choice. They were forced there and then sealed inside.
Palestinian writer Muhammad Shehada, who was born in Gaza and now lives in Denmark, told Democracy Now! yesterday that “Israel tried, since 1948 until today, to destroy us as a people, as a group, and they failed at it. Our people are still there, resilient. Now this veneer of civility has fallen off. The mask was taken off. And now it’s a matter of national pride in Israel to brag about annihilating Palestinians.”
This is a disability justice story
CripJustice identifies what systems do to bodies. The Nakba is one of the most significant mass disabling events in modern history, and it has never stopped.
The study on how decades of occupation, relocation, bombing, and siege have affected Palestinian mental and physical health is substantial and consistent. A longitudinal study of Palestinian adolescents and adults from 2006 to 2021 discovered that all participants had been exposed to traumatic events by 2021. Not most. 100 percent. Studies have indicated that 23.2 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza suffer from PTSD, 17.3 percent from anxiety disorders, and 15.3 percent from depression. A meta-analysis of 28 studies indicated that PTSD prevalence among Palestinian children was 36 percent, with certain groups reaching 70 percent.
However, as big as these figures are, they do not accurately reflect what Palestinian physicians say. Some Palestinian medics believe that there is no PTSD in Gaza since PTSD is characterized by its aftermath, which does not exist in Gaza. The traumatization is continuous. It’s never stopped. It is occurring right now, yesterday, on Nakba Day, when a missile struck a building full of displaced people without warning.
The physical disability caused by this ongoing catastrophe is equally staggering. UNICEF reports that since October 2023, over 50,000 Palestinian children have been killed or maimed in Gaza. According to UNICEF, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed 70 Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank since early last year, an average of one per week. Since October 2023, the overall death toll in Gaza has surpassed 74,000 Palestinians, with more than 172,000 wounded. A significant portion of those injured will be permanently disabled.
[Hazem Bader/AFP]
The Rafah crossing and the disabled who could not leave
We’ve written the Indonesian Hospital and the systematic targeting of Gaza’s healthcare system. The Rafah crossing is when that story gets most viscerally physical. When Israeli forces seized the Gaza side of the Rafah border in May 2024, they trapped around 20,000 sick and disabled Palestinians within a territory whose health care system had been purposely destroyed.
When the crossing reopened temporarily in February 2025 under ceasefire terms, just 50 patients per day were allowed to cross. More than 12,000 patients were awaiting evacuation. In protest, dozens of injured Palestinians in wheelchairs held a rally near the hospital, demanding that the number be raised. Farid al-Qassas, an injured man, told UN News: “In this building alone, there are over 100 patients in need of medical referrals, and the number of wounded waiting to go is around 13,000 sick and injured individuals. We hope that everyone will listen to us and preserve what remains of these patients.
Youssef Awad, a young boy in a wheelchair, told reporters at the crossing, “I hope to travel for treatment and return walking like other children.”When the crossing reopened temporarily in February 2025 under ceasefire terms, just 50 patients per day were allowed to cross. More than 12,000 patients were awaiting evacuation. In protest, dozens of injured Palestinians in wheelchairs held a rally near the hospital, demanding that the number be raised. Farid al-Qassas, an injured man, told UN News: “In this building alone, there are over 100 patients in need of medical referrals, and the number of wounded waiting to go is around 13,000 sick and injured individuals. We hope that everyone will listen to us and preserve what remains of these patients.
Youssef Awad, a young boy in a wheelchair, told reporters at the crossing, “I hope to travel for treatment and return walking like other children.”
When the crossing reopened in February 2026, the Palestinian Ministry of Health documented harrowing testimony from patients who were able to leave: after crossing, armed Palestinian men supported by Israeli military personnel took them to an Israeli military checkpoint, where some were handcuffed, blindfolded, searched, threatened, and had their belongings confiscated. Adalah and Gisha, two Israeli human rights organizations, described this as “a policy of abuse and unlawful restrictions” that amounted to forced relocation. Disabled Palestinians seeking medical care outside Gaza who arrived at the crossing after months or years of waiting were handcuffed and blindfolded.
The transgenerational dimension
The trauma of 1948 didn’t stay in 1948. Research on transgenerational trauma among Palestinian refugees shows how the psychological wounds of the Nakba have been passed down through generations, with grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original refugees carrying the weight of dispossession in their bodies and their mental health. This is not a metaphor. It is a verified, quantifiable, neurobiological reality. Displacement, loss, occupation, and the continual threat of violence all affect how trauma is encoded in the body, and these changes can be passed down.
Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib reintroduced her resolution acknowledging the ongoing Palestinian Nakba Wednesday, claiming, “The Nakba never ended. It continues to this day as Israeli forces continue to commit genocide in Gaza and dispossess Palestinians across all of Palestine.”
For Palestinians in the diaspora, the Nakba causes a distinct and recognized type of psychological injury: the grief of dispossession from a home one has never seen, the weight of keys passed down through generations, and the impossibility of return imposed by international law that is not implemented. In December 1948, the UN General Assembly voted Resolution 194, establishing Palestinian refugees’ right to return to their homes. It has not been implemented for 78 years. The right is on paper. The keys are in refugee camps. The villages exist in memory. The people are in exile.
What disability justice demands
The disability justice framework asks, “Who is allowed to have a body?” Whose body is protected by the state, and which is targeted by it? Whose pain is identified and addressed, and whose pain is caused by policy and then ignored?
The Nakba provides obvious answers to those questions. For 78 years, Palestinians have been targeted, dispossessed, imprisoned, bombarded, starved, and denied medical care by a system that works with near-total impunity. The disability caused by that system is not incidental. This is the point. The continued refusal to allow Palestinians to return, rebuild, heal, access medical treatment, or leave a besieged territory through a crossing without being handcuffed is part of the same project.
Yesterday, on Nakba Day, seven more Palestinians were killed in a residential building in Gaza City. Three of them were women. One was a child.
The Nakba is not history. It is the news.
Sources
Seven killed in Gaza on Nakba Day as Israel says it targets Hamas member — Al Jazeera, May 15, 2026
For Palestinians, the Nakba Isn’t Just History. It’s Also Our Present — Truthout, May 15, 2026
The Nakba in the Time of Genocide — Arab Center DC, May 2026
Commemoration of the 78th Anniversary of the Nakba — UN, May 15, 2026
Palestinians gather to mark 78th anniversary of the Nakba — Euronews, May 12, 2026
Nakba Day: Remembering When It All Began — CT Examiner, May 15, 2026
Traumatic events and psychological wellbeing among Palestinians — PMC, 2025
Development of a context-specific trauma scale among a Palestinian adult population — PMC, 2024
78th Nakba Day: Remembering the tragedy shadowed by the Gaza crisis — WION News, May 2026
Rafah Crossing opened after nearly nine months of closure — Gisha, February 2025
