# Naksa

The Naksa (Arabic: النكسة, "the setback") was the displacement of around 280,000 to 325,000 Palestinians from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, when the territories were captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. A number of Palestinian villages were destroyed by the Israeli military, such as Imwas, Yalo, Bayt Nuba, Beit Awwa, and Al-Jiftlik, among others.

## Background

Historian Tom Segev writes that "the hope of moving the Arabs of Palestine to other states had been a constant factor in the Zionist movement", and that "during British rule, Zionist leaders looked into various ways of paying Arabs to move to distant provinces." During the 1948 Palestine war, there were major expulsions of Palestinians, which resulted in ~750,000 Palestinian refugees. Approximately 145,000 of those expelled in 1967 were already refugees from the 1948 displacement. After the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the West Bank was annexed to Jordan and the Gaza Strip became an unrecognized client state of Egypt known as the All-Palestine Protectorate until its dissolution in 1959.

### Six-Day War

In April 1967, Israel and Syria engaged in a border skirmish that culminated in the downing of six Syrian MiG fighters near the Golan Heights. Shortly thereafter, after receiving misleading reports about IDF activity on the Israeli-Syrian border from the Soviet Union, Egypt expelled UNEF peacekeepers from the Sinai Peninsula and later blockaded the Straits of Tiran. Roughly two weeks later, Israel responded with a surprise attack against the air forces of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, beginning the Six-Day War. Following Israel's victory in the war, it occupied several territories that had previously belonged to its neighbors under the newly-established Israeli Military Governorate.

## Naksa

By December 1967, 245,000 had fled from the West Bank and Gaza Strip into Jordan, 11,000 had fled from the Gaza Strip to Egypt and 116,000 Palestinians and Syrians had fled from the Golan Heights further into Syria. Until 1967, roughly half of all Palestinians still lived within the boundaries of former Mandatory Palestine, but after 1967 the majority lived as refugees in other countries.
The refugee camps of Aqabat Jaber, ʿEin as-Sultan, and Nu‘aymah, whose residents were refugees from the 1948 Palestinian expulsions, were almost entirely emptied, with approximately 50,000 people having fled or been expelled to Jordan.
A United Nations Special Committee heard allegations of the destruction of over 400 Arab villages, but no evidence in corroboration was furnished to the Special Committee to investigate Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the population of the occupied territories. In 1971, this UN committee published a report in which it stated that:
   On the basis of the testimony placed before it or obtained by it in the course of its investigations, the Special Committee had been led to conclude that the Government of Israel is deliberately carrying out policies aimed at preventing the population of the occupied territories from returning to their homes and forcing those who are in their homes in the occupied territories to leave, either by direct means such as deportation or indirectly by attempts at undermining their morale or through the offer of special inducements, all with the ultimate object of annexing and settling the occupied territories. The Special Committee considers the acts of the Government of Israel in furtherance of these policies to be the most serious violation of human rights that has come to its attention. The evidence shows that this situation has deteriorated since the last mission of the Special Committee in 1970.
After the psychological warfare unit made a visit to Qalqilya and many of the residents had fled, the UN representative Nils-Göran Gussing noted that 850 of the town's 2,000 houses were demolished.

## Commemmoration

The Naksa is commemorated annually on Naksa Day, a day of remembrance for the events of the 1967 displacement.

## Historiography

Historian Nur Masalha wrote in 2003 that: "In contrast to the large number of books written on the Palestinian refugee exodus of 1948, only meagre historical research has been carried out on the 1967 exodus."