LONDON: The population of the Occupied Palestinian Territories has increased tenfold since 1948, the year in which the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” displaced almost a million Palestinians from their homes to neighboring Arab countries, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics said that 957,000 people out of a population of 1.4 million were displaced by Israeli militias, many of them to other countries, some to Gaza and the West Bank, during the establishment of modern-day Israel 77 years ago this month.

The remainder, about 450,000, were already in Gaza and the West Bank, where the population now stands at 5.5 million. This represents more than a tenfold increase since the Nakba, which Palestinians commemorate on May 15 each year.

Ola Awad, the president of the bureau, said: “The atrocities of Zionist forces (in 1948) also included more than 70 massacres in which more than 15,000 Palestinians were martyred.”

According to the bureau’s statistics, Israeli forces destroyed 531 Palestinian towns and villages during the Nakba. A further 200,000 people were displaced from the occupied territories to neighboring countries by the Six-Day War in June 1967, which led to the occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and the Syrian Golan Heights.

Awad said the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, which began in October 2023, has reduced the Palestinian population in the occupied territories by 10 percent, as more than 52,000 people have been killed and thousands displaced.

The statistics bureau said that since 1948, an estimated 154,000 people have been killed in the occupied territories or Arab countries as a result of Israeli attacks or armed clashes. The majority were Palestinian, but some were citizens of other Arab countries. Nearly 34 percent of them lived Gaza and were killed in the past two years.