75 years between Deir Yassin and Al Maamadani massacres of the Palestinian people. By Bisan Khalaf

In 1948, half a million Palestinians were displaced and had to leave their homes due to fear of persecution from the Israeli occupation. They left their homeland with a big hope of returning one day, but they could not return to this date due to Israel refusal. Today, after decades of occupation, the scenes of 1948 are repeating in Gaza with Israeli government officials calling for the voluntary removal of Palestinian people from Gaza.

Since the establishment of the Israeli state, the many Israeli governments relied on terrorizing citizens by committing inhumane massacres to force them to leave their lands. There are more than 5 millions of Palestinians who are Refugees or displaced. Israel is using the same methods to expel more Palestinians these days from the residents of Gaza.

For example, in 1948, the Irgun and Stern Israeli military gangs entered Deir Yassin village in Jerusalem, after a peace contract had been signed, demanded by the heads of the Jewish settlements and had been approved by the indigenous inhabitants of Deir Yassin. The Israeli military gangs stormed the village at dawn on April 9, 1948, while its residents were sleeping.

According to historical sources, the Irgun and Stern members were detonating houses and killing anything that moved, and they opened fire on a multitude of children, women, elderly; about 254 individual  were martyred in the Deir Yassin massacre.

As a result, Israeli gangs committed the Deir Yassin massacre to spread terror among the residents of neighboring Palestinian villages, to encourage them to leave too. Many Palestinians migrated to neighboring Arab towns in Palestine or to the neighbouring Arab Countries as well.

Today and after almost 75 years have passed, the Israeli soldiers are doing more brutal atrocities repeating what their of grandparenfs did in Palestine.

What is happening in Gaza now, the past including the Deir Yassin Massacre reminds us of numerous other Israeli massacres that was carried out to eliminate Palestinians, especially, the most recent Al-Maamadani Hospital massacre in Gaza in 2023, when the Israeli occupation’s aircraft annihilated many of the innocent refugees who were sheltering in the hospital. As per the sources, nearly 300 people were killed in this attack, most of them children and women.

However, will the residents of Gaza be displaced after all these horrific massacres in the northern and the southern of Gaza?

A large portion of Gaza’s population is still committed to remaining in the city, to avoid repeating the scene of the Nakba in 1948,
despite the encouragement of some Western countries to receive refugees from Gaza, but among 75 years Palestinians learnt from their tragedy that land is more precious than lives.