Palestinians hold keys on Catastrophe Day

[joeblow]

Palestinians hold keys on Catastrophe Day

http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=9 ... =351020202


Sat, 16 May 2009 06:13:37 GMT

Thousands of Palestinians have marked 'Nakba Day', the 61st anniversary of Israeli occupation of Palestine, calling for the Palestinian refugees' right of return.

The protesters commemorated the anniversary by staging rallies and demonstrations in the West Bank and the blockaded Gaza Strip on Thursday and Friday.

Palestinians call 15 May 1948, when hundreds of thousands of people lost their homes and the Zionist movement declared the creation of Israel on the usurped land, al-Nakba or The Day of National Catastrophe.

Demonstrators in northern Gaza Strip chanted for the Right of Return and called for ending the two-year-old tight Israeli blockade on the enclave. They also called for unity and ending the rift between Gaza and West Bank.

Dozens of protestors carried Palestinians flags, symbolic keys resembling the keys to their homes destroyed during Israel's creation, maps of historic Palestine, and official documents that prove their right to their homes and lands they were forced to evacuate during the Nakba, International Middle East Media Center reported.

Referring to six million Palestinian refugees in Palestine and in different parts of the world, the speakers at the protests said that the Right of Return to their towns and homeland passes from one generation to the other and Palestinians never accept to give up this legitimate right.

Ahmed Bahar, a senior Hamas leader and deputy speaker of parliament (PLC) dominated by Hamas told the crowds of demonstrators in northern Gaza that "the right of return is an individual and massive legitimate right."

"Anyone who makes a concession on this holy and legitimate right will be committing the crime of high treason," Bahar told the crowds after Friday prayers north of Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza Strip.

Millions of Palestinians fled their homes after Israeli forces, occupying the Palestinian territories, stormed their villages and cities in 1948 and forced them to leave after hundreds of them were slaughtered.

The refugees were hosted in refugee camps in Gaza, West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Libya and in a number of other Arab countries, North and South America, and the rest of the world.

Israel rejects the Palestinians' right of return to their land.

MSH/DT