In a statement, the ministry urged governments to acknowledge the Nakba as a form of ethnic cleansing, hold those responsible for crimes against Palestinians accountable, and work to reverse its consequences through justice, reparations, and the fulfilment of Palestinian rights.
The foreign ministry said the Nakba was “not merely a historical tragedy, but an ongoing crime and a colonial project” rooted in the 1917 Balfour declaration.
Authored by British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour and addressed to Lord Walter Rothschild, a major figure in the Zionist movement, the declaration promised Zionist settlers a “national home” in Palestine while denying the native Arab Palestinian population the right to self-determination in their own homeland.
In another grave injustice, the UN Partition Plan of 1947 proposed dividing Palestine, then under British Mandate rule, allocating about 56 percent of the territory to a Jewish state and about 42 percent to an Arab state—with the remaining area designated as an international zone for Jerusalem— despite vehement opposition from Arab Palestinians, who were the native inhabitants and made up two-thirds of the population at the time.
During the 1948 war, Zionist gangs, which later formed the Israeli army, carried out a campaign of violence and massacres that drove more than 750,000 Arabs—around 80 percent of the native Palestinian population in the parts of Historic Palestine that became Israel—from their homeland.
The Zionist project, which sought to establish a Jewish majority in Palestine, “was designed to uproot the Palestinian people, erase their identity and replace them with settlers," added the ministry statement.
During the same period, more than 530 Palestinian villages were destroyed by Zionist militias and the Israeli army as Israel built its state on the ruins of a people uprooted in one of the most harrowing acts of ethnic cleansing of the 20th century.
After the war, Israel refused to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland, while facilitating Jewish immigration from around the world under the Law of Return, helping cement a Jewish majority in the self-declared state.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees had no choice but to live in camps scattered across Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.
For decades, UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, has served as a lifeline for millions of Palestinian refugees in camps across host Arab countries.
The foreign ministry said the Nakba “did not stop”, warning that the same process of dispossession continues today through Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, its expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank, and its entrenchment of control over East Jerusalem.
A girl holds a large mockup of a traditional key, symbolising the homes that Palestinians were expelled from in 1948 during the Nakba, during a demonstration commemorating the 78th anniversary of the event in the city of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank on 12 May 2026. AFP
The Palestinian government's call on the world to designate Nakba as a war crime seems to build on growing international condemnation of Israel's wars in the region and its attempts to annex the West Bank and East Jerusalem to thwart the dream of an independent Palestinian State.
In January 2024, the International Court of Justice deemed the Israeli war in Gaza could amount to acts of genocide, but it has yet to issue a final ruling. In 2025, a UN committee deemed the Israeli actions in the war met the threshold of genocide against a people.
Moreover, in late 2024, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes against humanity in the Gaza war, including using starvation as a weapon of war. Finally, in the summer of 2025, the UN declared that the Israeli blockade of Gaza had triggered the first-ever famine in the Middle East.
The Palestinian move also comes amid the weakening of unconditional public support in Western societies for Israel to low historic levels and a growing international movement of solidarity with the legitimate rights of the Palestinians.
A displaced Palestinian girl looks on as she stands amid tents and makeshift shelters in the Bureij refugee camp in Gaza. AFP
In its call on Friday, the Palestinian foreign ministry accused Israel of carrying out “wilful killings, arbitrary detention, settlement, annexation, settler terrorism and the theft of funds and resources," saying the “Israeli killing machine has not stopped its annihilation of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip."
The ministry called for Palestinian self-determination, independence for a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, the right of return and compensation for refugees under UN Resolution 194, and continued support for UNRWA as “an authentic witness to the crime of the Nakba and refuge”.
In Gaza, many Palestinians now view Israel’s genocidal war on the strip as a renewed attempt to trigger a new Nakba. Despite 31 months of bombardment, widespread destruction of homes and entire towns, and a prolonged blockade that has pushed the population toward famine, they say they refuse to leave their land.
Large numbers now live in tents and makeshift shelters, as descendants of Nakba survivors, echoing the displacement experienced by their ancestors after 1948.
Today, the worldwide Palestinian population has reached 15.5 million. About 7.4 million live in historical Palestine, while 8.1 million live in the diaspora, including 6.8 million in Arab countries, according to a recent report issued by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics on the anniversary of the Nakba.
A demonstrator holds a t-shirt with a political message and a novelty ukulele painted in the colours of a watermelon during a "Nakba Remembrance Day" ceremony organised by Arab-Palestinian students and left-wing Israeli activists at the Tel Aviv University campus in Tel Aviv on 13 May 2026. AFP
The figures mean that the number of Palestinians in historical Palestine, including 2 million who hold Israeli citizenship inside Israel and more than 5 million in the occupied Palestinian territories, is fast catching up with the number of Jews in the country, estimated at 7.5 million.
This is what Israel has long deemed a “demographic bomb” threatening the so-called “Jewish identity” of the country, and partially explains the Zionist drive to expel as many Palestinians as possible from the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and Jerusalem.
In the past three years, millions around the world have joined Palestinian and Arab protesters in dozens of capitals in the West and across the globe, not only to demand an end to Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and occupation of the West Bank, but also to call on governments to recognize the legitimate national rights of the Palestinians.
Today, more than 81 percent of the international community, 157 UN member states, recognize Palestinian statehood and support a two-state solution based on pre-1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital.
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