From one generation to the next, Palestinians aim to keep the history of al-Nakba alive

Mohammad Zarqa trembled with fear as he watched panicked crowds of people, screaming and covered in blood, rush into his small village on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

Mohammad Zarqa trembled with fear as he watched panicked crowds of people, screaming and covered in blood, rush into his small village on the outskirts of Jerusalem. “You have to run,” he remembers a woman crying out, shocking Zarqa out of a daze and sending him racing home to warn his family. He was only 12 years old at the time, unaware of the looming war that would soon upend his life. It was April 9, 1948, and Jewish militias had just attacked Deir Yassin, a village about a mile northeast of Zarqa’s home in Ein Karem in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. At least 100 people, including women and children, were killed – many stripped, lined up and shot with automatic fire, according to reports from the time archived by the United Nations. The massacre is among the events that led to al-Nakba, or “the catastrophe,” when roughly 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes by armed Jewish groups seeking to establish the state of Israel. “We thought we were going to be next,” Zarqa, now 88, tells CNN from his home in New Jersey. “My father said, ‘We cannot stay here. They’re going to come and massacre us.’ We had nothing, no weapons, nothing to defend ourselves. That’s the day we became refugees.” On Wednesday, Zarqa joins millions of Palestinians across the world to mark Nakba Day with protests and community events intended to honor the memory of the Palestinians killed and displaced in 1948 and the brutal war unfolding today in Gaza.