WASHINGTON — Many were gathered Saturday afternoon at a March for Palestine rally near the National Mall to commemorate Nakba Day, which this year holds even greater meaning amid deadly clashes between Palestine and Israel over the last month.
The rally was centered around showing solidarity and commemorating 73 years of the ongoing Nakba, which is the recognition of Palestinian villages destroyed after the fall out of the 1948 Palestine War. It is believed that around 700,000 people were expelled from or fled their homes in what was now Israel during the war surrounding its creation.
Those gathered at Saturday's event are concerned, angered and frustrated by Israel's retaliation in the Gaza Strip towards Palestine.
The latest outburst of violence started in Jerusalem and spread across the region over the past week, with Jewish-Arab clashes and rioting in mixed cities of Israel. There were also widespread Palestinian protests Friday in the occupied West Bank, where Israeli forces shot and killed 11 people.
Since Monday night, Hamas has fired hundreds of rockets into Israel, which has pounded the Gaza Strip with strikes of its own. In Gaza, at least 145 people have been killed, including 41 children and 23 women; in Israel, eight people have been killed, including a man killed by a rocket that hit in Ramat Gan, a suburb of Tel Aviv, on Saturday.
The tensions began in east Jerusalem earlier this month, with Palestinian protests against attempts by settlers to forcibly evict a number of Palestinian families from their homes and Israeli police measures at Al-Aqsa Mosque, a frequent flashpoint located on a mount in the Old City revered by Muslims and Jews.
Nakba Day rally amid tension between Palestine and Isreal
The conflict has reverberated widely. Israeli cities with mixed Arab and Jewish populations have seen nightly violence, with mobs from each community fighting in the streets and trashing each other’s property.
The spiraling violence has raised fears of a new Palestinian “intifada,” or uprising, when peace talks have not taken place in years.
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