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00:00 It is then the event 76 years ago that is right at the core of the Palestinian national struggle.
00:07 A day of high tension in the Middle East as the Palestinian people today mark the Nakba,
00:11 Arabic for catastrophe, the day when some 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes
00:18 following the establishment of Israel. For many, a painful moment that many others could say
00:23 could pale in comparison to what is now unfolding in Gaza.
00:28 "We lived through the Nakba not just once, we were displaced several times. Palestinian exile,
00:36 we lived through it not just once but several times. In 2014 we were displaced, in 2008 we
00:42 were displaced, in 2022 we were displaced. I was a child in 1967 as well and the circumstances
00:48 were very difficult."
00:49 Well let's cross into Jerusalem. We're going to talk to our correspondent Iris Mackler who joins
00:56 us now. Iris, as we had there, I mean it is for many a very painful day isn't it?
01:01 "It is a painful day, it's always a painful day and we've now seen the beginning of marchers
01:08 across the West Bank. They usually continue, they often end in clashes as well. So we're seeing that
01:16 as Palestinians mark the Nakba, the catastrophe that was the creation of the state of Israel
01:22 but their dispossession. It's quite interesting because these two events, the Israelis marking
01:28 the creation of their state, Palestinians marking their dispossession in 1948, the shadow of the
01:35 events of today are hanging over both of these events. So you can see a very muted celebration
01:44 in Israel over the past 24 hours, a very muted Memorial Day the day before that and you know
01:52 the reality of an ongoing war, the longest that Israel has fought since 1948, since that war
01:59 that these people are marching today to commemorate and to mark what it means to not,
02:06 to still have that refugee mindset for Palestinians and still feel the pain of that
02:13 dispossession so many years, 76 years after it happened. I mean for many of these Palestinians,
02:20 most of them I would say, are born after the Nakba but it lives for them as the defining story
02:27 of the defining narrative of being Palestinian. Iris, it comes of course as Israel is pushing
02:34 further and further into Gaza as well doesn't it? Yes that's right. We have heard from the Israeli
02:43 Defence Force spokesperson who was talking to journalists and said this is a limited military
02:50 action. Nevertheless at the same time we see that there are more tanks coming to the east
02:56 of Rafah, that's the city in the south that borders between, on the border between Gaza
03:01 and Egypt. We have reports of now more than half a million people who have left Rafah. They are
03:08 not indigenous Rafah, citizens of Rafah. They are something like, there was about 300,000 people who
03:14 lived in Rafah, now about a million who have joined fleeing the wars in the north. They're
03:21 now there in the south and they're now moving again. So that's what we see. We have reports,
03:27 I just saw a report from one of the hospitals in Rafah saying they've run out of fuel, that means
03:33 no electricity. They run their hospital on generators, their power on generators,
03:39 no electricity for them. So it's a reprise I guess of what we saw earlier in the war. There's been
03:45 three months, you'd call it Stuart, of more quiet. But now we see fighting in the north of the Gaza
03:50 Strip. We see this preparation for a very large battle in the south of the Gaza Strip at Rafah.
03:57 We see rockets coming into Israel from Gaza, including this morning. And we see a real
04:05 intensity of fighting in the north of Israel, that is the south of Lebanon, the north of Israel with
04:13 Hezbollah on that border. And I just want to say that on that border, indeed inside Israel,
04:17 there are still tens of thousands of civilians who are not in their homes, dispossessed inside
04:24 Israel, and tens of thousands both in Gaza and in southern Lebanon who are not in their homes
04:29 either. So this is a very costly, very lengthy military operation for people on both sides.
04:35 Yes, thanks very much. Eris Mackler, a correspondent talking to us live there from Jerusalem.