RAMALLAH, Monday, May 13, 2019 (WAFA) – Despite the displacement of more than 800,000 Palestinians following the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe), and the displacement of more than 200,000 Palestinians (majority of them to Jordan) after the 1967 war, the Palestinian world population totaled 13.1 million by the end of 2018, which means that the number of Palestinians in the world has doubled more than 9 times since the events of the Nakba of 1948, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) said today.
Marking the 71st Nakba anniversary, which coincides on May 15, the PCBS said more than half of the Palestinian population live in historic Palestine by the end of 2018 where their number reached 6.48 million, 1.57 million of them live in the territories occupied in 1948 currently called Israel, 2.95 million in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, and around 1.96 million in Gaza Strip.
The data show that 49% of the Palestinian population lives in historic Palestine where Jews constitute 51% at the end of 2018.
Nakba describes a process of ethnic cleansing in which an unarmed nation was destroyed and its population displaced systematically by gangs and individuals from all over the world. The Nakba resulted in the displacement of 800,000 out of the 1.4 million Palestinians who lived in historical Palestine in 1948 in 1,300 villages and towns. The majority of the displaced Palestinians ended up in neighboring Arab countries and in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and other countries in the world.
Records of the United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) reported on 1st January 2018 that the total number of Palestinian refugees was 6.02 million, 28.4% of whom live in 58 camps (10 in Jordan, 9 in Syria, 12 in Lebanon, 19 in the West Bank and 8 in Gaza Strip).
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