By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif called on Saturday for an immediate end to the suffering of the Palestinian people, marking the 78th anniversary of the Nakba, the Arabic term for “catastrophe” that commemorates the mass displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that led to the founding of Israel.
In a post on X, Sharif said Pakistan and its people “remember the enduring suffering and displacement of the Palestinians from their homeland.” He added: “Pakistan reaffirms its unwavering solidarity with our Palestinian brothers and sisters. We demand an immediate end to the oppression, occupation, and violence being perpetrated by Israeli occupation authorities against Palestinians.”
Pakistan has never recognized Israel and has long advocated for an independent Palestinian state along the pre-1967 borders, with Al-Quds Al-Sharif — East Jerusalem — as its capital, based on internationally agreed parameters.
President Asif Ali Zardari echoed the message in his own Nakba Day statement, describing the events of 1948 as an unclosed chapter. “For the Palestinian people, the Nakba is not a closed chapter of history,” Zardari said. “It remains a continuing reality marked by occupation, displacement, dispossession and denial of rights.” He called on the international community to sustain support for Palestinian refugees and to uphold their right of return as affirmed in U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194. “On this solemn day,” he said, “Pakistan calls upon the international community to ensure continued support for the Palestinian people, particularly Palestinian refugees.”
The statements came as Pakistan’s ambassador to the United Nations, Asim Iftikhar Ahmad, addressed a special meeting on Friday at UN headquarters in New York organized by the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. Ahmad told the gathering — which included testimony from bereaved Palestinian families, among them the mother of 5-year-old Hind Rajab, whose death in Gaza has become a symbol of civilian loss — that the world is witnessing “a new Nakba” in the enclave. “The Nakba must not be allowed to continue into another generation of Palestinians,” Ahmad said. “It must end through justice, accountability, and the vacation of illegal occupation.”
More than 70,000 Palestinians have been killed and the overwhelming majority of Gaza’s population displaced multiple times since Israeli military operations began in October 2023, according to Palestinian authorities and UN figures cited in the meeting. Even after a fragile ceasefire took hold late last year, shortages of food, water, medicine and fuel have persisted because of restricted aid access, leaving the territory in a dire humanitarian crisis, Ahmad said.
He pointed to the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, where illegal settlement expansion, settler violence, forced displacement and restrictions on movement continue. The recent storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque by Israeli extremists, he said, exemplified efforts “to alter the demographic and geographic character of the occupied Palestinian territory and to make Palestinian existence on their own land increasingly untenable.”
Pakistan’s envoy also urged sustained political and financial support for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), which he described as indispensable for millions living in exile. “On this solemn anniversary, remembrance alone is not enough,” he said.
In Pakistan, Nakba Day was observed on Friday at the appeal of the Palestine Foundation Pakistan. Special prayers were offered after Friday sermons in mosques nationwide, and demonstrations condemned Zionist oppression. The largest rally filled the area outside the Karachi Press Club, where leaders from political and religious parties, lawyers, artists, teachers, students and civil society groups carried Palestinian flags and banners bearing the images of slain Palestinians, Iranians and Lebanese.
Speakers described Israel’s presence in Palestine as “illegal and illegitimate,” noting that Pakistan’s founder, Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, had warned against the consequences of a Zionist state and insisted Pakistan would never recognize it. They said millions of Palestinians remain refugees after 78 years, still hoping to return to their homeland, and urged Pakistan’s parliament to pass resolutions supporting the right of return.
Pakistan’s consistent position — rooted in its own independence struggle — remains that a just and durable peace requires the establishment of an independent, sovereign and contiguous Palestinian state on the basis of the pre-1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
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