In the war surrounding Israel's establishment, some 700,000–760,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from the territory that became the State of Israel, in what Palestinians call the Nakba ('catastrophe'). Displacement began amid intercommunal fighting after the November 1947 UN Partition Plan and intensified during the 1948–49 war with neighboring Arab states. Palestinian refugees settled in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, where many and their descendants remain registered with UNRWA today, numbering over 5.9 million. Israel emerged with control over about 78% of Mandate Palestine, more than the UN partition plan had allotted to a Jewish state.
Zionist militias/Israeli forces and neighboring Arab states' armies fought over Mandate Palestine; the State of Israel was established and roughly 80% of the Palestinian Arab population fled or was expelled from the territory that became Israel.
Mandate government figures, the 1945 Village Statistics and the UNSCOP report of 1947 put the Arab population of Palestine at roughly 1.3 million, against about 600,000 Jews. Estimates of those displaced range from the UN Mediator's 726,000 and the UNRWA registration of about 750,000 refugees to Israeli estimates of 520,000 and Palestinian estimates approaching 900,000.
Component estimates: Benny Morris puts Palestinian Arab dead at about 5,800, including some 800 civilians and prisoners killed in massacres, while the Palestinian historian Aref al-Aref gives 13,000, mostly civilians; Arab state armies lost an estimated 4,000-15,000; Israel lost 6,373, of whom roughly 4,000 were soldiers. Palestinian sources favour the higher civilian figures and Israeli accounts the lower; the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine put the refugee total at 711,000 in 1951.
Benny Morris and other Israeli 'New Historians' working from declassified Israeli state and military archives documented the killing of at least 107 villagers at Deir Yassin, executions of prisoners, a number of rapes, and the depopulation and demolition of more than 400 Arab villages; Morris and Ilan Pappé differ sharply on whether this amounted to a premeditated expulsion policy.
Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan