Israel - Palestine: Palestinian women and children driven from their homes by Israeli forces, 1948

The 1948 Palestinian exodus, known in Arabic as the Nakba (Arabic: an-Nakbah, lit.'catastrophe'), occurred when more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes, during the 1947-1948 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine and the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The exact number of refugees is a matter of dispute, but around 80 percent of the Arab inhabitants of what became Israel (50 percent of the Arab total of Mandatory Palestine) left or were expelled from their homes. Later in the war, Palestinians were forcibly expelled as part of 'Plan Dalet' in a policy of 'ethnic cleansing'.