Gaza, ALRAY – Palestinians are marking on Wednesday the 46th anniversary of Land Day, in remembrance of the expropriation of Palestinian land by the Israeli government on that day in 1976.
On 30 March 1976, six Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces as hundreds of Palestinian people took to the streets to protest against the Israeli expropriation of thousands of hectares of land in the towns of Arraba and Sakhnin, sparking a mass popular Palestinian intifada.
The land expropriation order coincided with a curfew announced at five o’clock a day earlier by the Israeli occupation in several Palestinian towns.
The Palestinian people rejected this move and answered a call by the Palestinian Land Defense Committee by taking to the streets to protest the Israeli scheme to illegally expropriate their land.
After breaking into the Palestinian towns of Sakhnin, Kafr Kanna, Arraba, Deir Hanna, Al-Tiba, Tur'an, and Umm al-Fahm, the Israeli forces violently suppressed the popular, peaceful demonstrations, killing six Palestinian citizens, including a young woman and a child, and injuring hundreds of others.
Naming the scheme as the ‘Galilee Development Project,’ the Israeli government aimed at completely Judaizing the expropriated land, which would have a direct impact on thousands of Palestinians, who are living and working on their land.
Between 1948 and 1972, the Israeli occupation authorities expropriated more than one million dunums of land in the Palestinian villages in the occupied Galilee and Triangle area, in addition to other millions of dunums seized following the 1948 Nakba.
Over 1,900,000 Palestinians are now living in the Palestinian territories occupied in 1948, comprising about 21 percent of the total population living in historic Palestine.
