A dozen Israeli bombings on the Hezbollah-led city of Nabatiyé in southern Lebanon

After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the League of Nations (ancestor of the United Nations, UN) entrusted the United Kingdom with a mandate over Palestine in 1920. London becomes “administrator” of the territory with the objective of “place the country in political, administrative and economic conditions that permit the establishment of a Jewish national home and the development of institutions of self-government”.

Resolution 181 approved by the United Nations General Assembly on November 29, 1947 provides for the separation of Palestine into three: a Jewish State, an Arab State and an area under international control that includes Jerusalem and its surroundings. “close to the suburbs”. It is accepted by a large majority of the Yishuv leaders – the representatives of the Jewish community of Palestine – but rejected by almost all the representatives of the Arabs of Palestine, as well as by the neighboring Arab states.

Without waiting for the hypothetical partition of Palestine, planned by the British for 1^Ahem In October 1948, David Ben-Gurion, future prime minister of the Hebrew State, declared the independence of Israel on the last day of the British mandate, May 14, 1948, in Tel Aviv.

The day after this declaration of independence, after months of tension and violence between communities, the armies of several neighboring Arab countries invaded the territory of former Mandatory Palestine.

The exodus and expulsions of Palestinian Arabs, which began with violence at the end of 1947, intensified with the entry into the war of Arab armies (mainly Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian, Lebanese and Iraqi) from the north, east and south.

These attacks were repelled and resulted in the conquest by the Jewish State of a vast territory, much larger than that proposed in the UN partition. For the Palestinian Arabs, it is the “Naqba” (“the catastrophe” in French), which seals the forced exile of between 600,000 and 800,000 of them.