Whereas May 15, 2026, is the 78th commemoration of the Palestinian Nakba, meaning catastrophe in English, a term which refers to Israel’s uprooting, dispossession, and exile of the Palestinian people from their homeland;

Whereas the United Nations General Assembly recommended on November 29, 1947, to partition Palestine into two States against the wishes of Palestine’s majority indigenous inhabitants;

Whereas, almost immediately following the passage of the United Nations partition plan, Zionist militias began a deliberate and systematic effort to expel Palestinians from their lands, a campaign which included massacres and other atrocities against civilian populations;

Whereas, before the State of Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, between 250,000 to 300,000 Palestinian refugees had already been forcibly expelled or fled from their homes, often following attacks by Zionist militias on major Palestinian cities and villages;

Whereas, by the time of the signing of armistice agreements between Israel and neighboring Arab countries in 1949, the new State of Israel had established control over 78 percent of Palestine and, in the process, conquered an additional 23 percent of Palestine beyond those areas allocated to the Jewish State under the partition plan;

Whereas, by the time of the 1949 armistice, Zionist militias and the new Israeli army had expelled at least 750,000 Palestinians, roughly 75 percent of the entire indigenous Palestinian population, from their homes in areas that became the State of Israel, becoming refugees living in exile;

Whereas, by 1949, Israel had depopulated more than 400 Palestinian villages and cities, often demolishing all homes and other structures and planting forests over them;

Whereas the United States knew of the scale and magnitude of the Palestinian refugee crisis as it unfolded, as is documented in an October 1948 telegram to the President and Secretary of State from the Embassy of the United States to Israel, warning that the Arab Refugee tragedy is rapidly reaching catastrophic proportions and should be treated as a disaster;

Whereas the United States voted in favor of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 on December 11, 1948, which states that Palestinian refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the governments or authorities responsible;

Whereas Palestinian refugees’ right of return is not only stipulated in a General Assembly resolution, but is also anchored in international law, including in Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states: Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country, and reaffirmed by the International Court of Justice;

Whereas international law also recognizes that descendants of those displaced remain refugees, and that according to the United Nations, Palestine refugees are not distinct from other protracted refugee situations such as those from Afghanistan or Somalia, where there are multiple generations of refugees, considered by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees as refugees and supported as such. Protracted refugee situations are the result of the failure to find political solutions to their underlying political crises;

Whereas, on December 8, 1949, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 302 establishing the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which the United States has financially supported on an almost continuous basis since its establishment until United States funding was suspended in January 2024;

Whereas, of the more than 7,000,000 Palestinian Nakba refugees, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East provides much-needed social services to 5,900,000 Palestine refugees today;

Whereas, in addition to this 1947 through 1949 Nakba refugee population, there are at least another 1,330,000 Palestinian refugees comprised of those displaced during the 1967 Naksa and their descendants, as well as at least 812,000 Palestinian internally displaced persons from both the Nakba and Naksa, who are likewise prevented from returning to their homes;

Whereas the Nakba refers not only to a historical event but to an ongoing process of Israel’s expropriation of Palestinian land and its dispossession of the Palestinian people that continues to this day, including the systematic destruction of Palestinian homes, neighborhoods, cities, and refugee camps, the construction and expansion of illegal settlements, and the confinement of Palestinians to ever-shrinking areas of land;

Whereas the apartheid Government of Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinian people which, between October 2023 and May 9, 2026, has—

(1)

killed at least 72,737 people in Gaza, including more than 21,289 children, with multiple peer-reviewed studies concluding the official death toll is likely a severe undercount, with thousands more Palestinians buried under the rubble and countless more dead as a result of siege, forced starvation, and the systematic destruction of civil, water, and health infrastructure;

(2)

wounded more than 172,539 in Gaza;

(3)

displaced over 1,900,000 in Gaza, many themselves refugees from the Nakba;

(4)

engineered a state of famine across Gaza; and

(5)

killed at least 1,160 people in the occupied West Bank, including 242 children;

Whereas the establishment and expansion of hundreds of illegal settlements and outposts in the occupied Palestinian West Bank in which approximately 743,600 Israelis reside as of 2025 is another form of ethnic cleaning used to perpetuate the Nakba;

Whereas the United States is complicit in Israel’s ongoing Nakba against the Palestinian people by providing Israel with weapons and diplomatic support even as its leaders openly announce and carry out plans to ethnically cleanse and depopulate Palestinian communities today; and

Whereas a just and lasting resolution requires respect for and the implementation of Palestine refugee rights as enshrined in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Now, therefore, be it