In 1948 more than 900,000 Palestinians were forced to leave their houses, by a deliberate mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. Today, there are more than 5 million Palestinian refugees in the world, out of a population of 9 million Palestinians in total.

Ayman Abu Mustafa is a Palestinian scholar with a Masters degree in History with a focus on the Middle East. He is currently engaged by the Rafto House Foundation in order to give lectures to school classes on the human rights situation for the Palestinian refugees.  In his lectures, Ayman Abu Mustafa also discuss the United Nation Resolution No.194 about the right of return for the Palestinian refugees.

Background

More than 500 Palestinian locations (cities, towns, villages and hamlets) were depopulated and obliterated or defaced from the map of the world in 1948. The remains of most of these locations are rubbles, ruins, debris of houses, collapsing walls, thorns and cactus left behind.

Some villages faced a dramatic fate, like Dayr Yasin, where more than 350 people were massacred. Furthermore, some villages were completely ethnically cleansed and faced a systematic looting of the inhabitants` houses by Israeli soldiers. An example of a village that was depopulated is Ayn Karim in Western Jerusalem.

The current situation of the Palestinian refugees inside the West Bank and the Gaza Strip like Jinin, Rafah and Khanyounis, has not changed very much in the period from 1948 and 1967 till 2004. In 1948 they were expelled from their homeland and became refugees in the West bank and the Gaza strip. Between 2000 and 2004, during the second Intifada (uprising) they became refugees for the third time during the last 50 years as a resulted from the systematic destruction of thousands of Palestinian houses by the Israelis, and the killing of more than 3000 Palestinians. Among the most violent Israeli military operations against the Palestinians in the second Intifada is the Jinin massacre in April 2002.