INTERNALLY DISPLACED PALESTINIANS MARCH TO HADATHA

Al-Quds, 5 Rajab 1436/25 April 2015 (MINA) – On April 23rd, the day that Jewish Israelis celebrated ‘Independence Day’, several thousand Palestinian citizens of Israel marched to the depopulated village of Hadatha in the annual March of Return.

The March of Return is the largest annual event that is held by internally displaced Palestinians demanding their right of return to the villages from which they were forcibly displaced during the Nakba.

Amidst sporadic rain and high winds this year’s event did not match the huge numbers who attended the march in 2014 although Palestinians from across 1948 occupied lands and areas of East Jerusalem west of the Apartheid Wall travelled to the Galilee to demand their rights, Middle East Monitor (MEMO) quoted by Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA) as reporting.

The village of Hadatha lies in the southern Galilee a few kilometres southwest of Tiberias.

On May 12th 1948, the village was attacked and forcibly depopulated by the Zionist Golani militia and subsequently destroyed.

Today, very little can be seen of the original village although occasional piles of large stones evidence the 122 houses that once housed more than 600 Palestinians. On a hillside, Hadatha’s cemetery can still be found as can the spring in the village’s lower lands.

At least 1 million Palestinians today live as citizens of the state of Israel of whom about a quarter are from villages that were destroyed and depopulated during the Nakba.

Although officially considered to be ‘residents’ of the State of Israel, these internally displaced Palestinians are prohibited from returning to live in their home villages.

Today more than 7 million Palestinians are living in enforced exile. The largest majority of those people are refugees and their descendents who were exiled during the original mass displacement that was enforced between 1947-49 by Zionist militias and later the Israeli army.

However, every decade since the Nakba began has also witnessed enforced displacement in a settler colonial project that continues at pace today a process which Palestinians refer to as the ‘Ongoing Nakba’. (T/P002/R03)

Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA)