Dawud Assad still has nightmares of the day Jewish militias attacked his village of Deir Yassin outside Jerusalem 76 years ago. Assad, then 16, peered out his front window to see his village ablaze. As his uncles shot back at the militias firing upon them, Assad escaped. But more than 100 Palestinians, including women, children, and elderly people, were killed in what is now referred to as the Deir Yassin massacre. Assad lost 27 members of his extended family that day, including his grandmother and his two-year-old brother, Omar.
The massacre at Deir Yassin, along with other attacks on Palestinian villages and the 1948 war surrounding Israel's creation, led to the Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe. The Nakba signifies the exodus of some 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were forced from what is now Israel.
