Palestinians mark Nakba in Gaza

Thousands gathered in the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza waving Palestinians flags and green banners of the Hamas movement which seized power in the impoverished enclave in 2007. Some protesters held up placards with names of villages demolished by Israeli forces during the 1948 war. ?We will return to Jaffa and to all our lands,? cried some, referring to an Arab town on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, some 60 kilometers north of Gaza. Last December, Israel began a devastating 22-day offensive against Gaza that ended in January and during which 1,400 Palestinians ? most of them civilians according to Palestinian medics ? were killed and thousands of homes destroyed. Senior Hamas official Ahmad Bahar told the crowd that the Palestinian people ?will never give up the right of return? to their homes and land in Israel. He also criticized Pope Benedict XVI for not visiting the Gaza Strip during his five-day visit to Israel and the occupied West Bank which ended yesterday. The pontiff visited the Aida refugee camp outside the West Bank town of Bethlehem on Thursday, where he expressed deep sympathy with refugees. ?With anguish, I have witnessed the situation of refugees who have had to flee their homes,? he said. Around 700,000 people were exiled in this way in 1948, with the United Nations estimating that today they and their descendants number 4.6 million, of which one million live in Gaza. Hamas on Thursday prevented President Mahmud Abbas? Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from holding any event to mark the Nakba in the tiny territory. Almost 500 Palestinians in south Lebanon yesterday marked the anniversary of the Nakba. The demonstrators raised Palestinian and Lebanese flags along with portraits of Hassan Nasrallah, head of Lebanon?s Shiite militant Hezbollah, and burned an Israeli flag near Fatima?s gate in Kfar Kila on the border with Israel. The concrete gate on the Lebanese-Israeli border became a national shrine in 2000 when Israeli troops withdrew from southern Lebanon after 22 years of occupation, Kazinform cites Arab News. See www.arabnews.com for full version.