Human Rights Glance
Palestinians around the world are marking Nakba Day, 78 years after their forced mass displacement led to the establishment of the Jewish-majority state of Israel. Decades later, Palestinians still face widespread oppression and violence from the Israeli state as it continues its expansionary project. “Israel tried, since 1948 until today, to destroy us as a people, as a group, and they failed at it.
Our people are still there, resilient,” says Palestinian writer Muhammad Shehada, who was born in Gaza and now lives in Denmark. Shehada discusses the ongoing process of the Nakba, including its latest intensification after October 7, 2023. “Now this veneer of civility has fallen off. The mask was taken off. And now it’s a matter of national pride in Israel to brag about annihilating Palestinians.”
Shehada also describes current conditions in Gaza — still under Israeli blockade and occupation — and what he calls the “disarmament trap” of unfairly weighted negotiations designed to strip Palestinians of political autonomy. “The 'realistic' proposal that Israel is putting on the table is surrender, capitulate, become fully defenseless, weaponless, and entrust the very army that carried out a genocide against you to be merciful towards you once you are an easier target than you ever were before.”
Finally, he responds to the Israeli government’s recent threat to file a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, after the paper published a column by longtime opinion writer Nicholas Kristof about systemic sexual abuse against Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons. “It’s the newspaper of record. It’ll be spread and disseminated widely to an American audience,” says Shehada about the allegations levied in Kristof’s piece. “So we see, basically,https://www.democracynow.org/2026/5/15/muhammad_shehada_nakba_day_gaza_palestinians an Israeli panic attack in return.”
Transcript
AMY GOODMAN: Today, Palestinians in Gaza and around the world are commemorating what Palestinians refer to as Nakba Day. Nakba means “the catastrophe” in Arabic. It was 78 years ago that some 750,000 Palestinians were violently displaced and dispossessed from hundreds of towns and villages in Palestine, thousands more killed, during the creation of the state of Israel. In Gaza, Palestinians marked the grim anniversary amidst reports that Israel dramatically increased its attacks on Gaza during April, despite a U.S-brokered ceasefire last October. In the occupied West Bank, UNICEF, the United Nations Children Fund, said Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed 70 Palestinian children since early last year, amounting to around one child killed per week. Another 850 children were injured by Israeli attacks during this past year.
The Division for Palestinian Rights (DPR) invites colleagues to the commemoration of the 78th anniversary of the Nakba, organized by the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. Please find information below from the Committee on the event:
What’s most shocking about the latest accounts of sexual torture of Palestinians in Israeli custody is not just their inherent horror. It is that despite so much evidence being so visible for so long, the machinery of abuse and denial continues to deepen.
Israel’s top commander in the occupied West Bank has said the army is killing Palestinians at levels “not seen since 1967”, according to Haaretz.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved the appointment of Yehuda Eliyahu on Monday.
The United States has criticised its allies for failing to stop a Gaza-bound aid flotilla that was raided and seized by Israeli naval forces earlier this week.
Once you picture schoolgirls, university students, mothers, aunts and grandmothers lying on their stomachs in prison pyjamas - their hands tied behind their backs, and soldiers looming over them, beating them if they move even slightly - you cannot forget the image. 
