MILLIONS around the globe marked the 78th anniversary of the Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” on Friday.

The anniversary refers to the mass expulsion and flight of some 750,000 Palestinians from what is now Israel during the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation. It is the third commemoration of the Nakba since the war in Gaza began.

For Palestinians, the Nakba meant the loss of most of their homeland.

Some 80 per cent of the Palestinians who lived in the area that became Israel were driven from their homes by forces of the nascent state before and during the war.

The fighting began when Arab armies attacked following Israel’s establishment as a home for Jews in the wake of the Holocaust. Palestinians who remained behind hold Israeli citizenship.

After the war, Israel refused to allow Palestinian refugees to return to ensure a Jewish majority within its borders.

Palestinians became a permanent refugee community that now numbers some six million, with most living in refugee camps in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Gaza.

Around 530 Palestinian villages were destroyed, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

Yusuf Abu Hamam, one of a dwindling number of Nakba survivors, says the current war is an even greater catastrophe.

Mr Abu Hamam and the rest of Gaza’s more than two million people are now crammed into less than half of the 25-mile-long strip along the Mediterranean coast, surrounded by an Israeli-controlled zone.

“There is no country left,” Mr Abu Hamam said, speaking next to his home, which was virtually destroyed by Israeli shelling earlier in the war.

Mr Abu Hamam’s birth village, al-Joura, was seized by the Israeli military as it advanced against Egyptian forces in November 1948.

Soldiers were ordered to destroy every home in the area to ensure their Palestinian populations couldn’t return, according to Israeli historian Benny Morris.

The ancestors of Ne’man Abu Jarad and his wife, Majida, avoided the original Nakba, but there was no escaping from what Majida now calls “our Nakba.”

Their hometown has been wiped off the map. Over the past year, Israeli bulldozers and controlled detonations have razed nearly every building in the northern Gaza towns of Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun.

Around 90 per cent of Gaza’s more than two million people have lost their homes, according to United Nations estimates, with most of them now sheltering in huge tent camps with rat infestations and pools of sewage.

The population is almost entirely dependent on hard-to-access aid to survive.