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How Many Palestinian Arab Refugees Were There?

(Israel Affairs-Middle East Forum) Efraim Karsh - At the end of the 1948 war, the Israeli government set the number of Palestinian refugees at 550,000-600,000, but within a year, as large masses of people sought to benefit from the unprecedented influx of international funds to the area, some 962,000 alleged refugees had been registered with the newly-established UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). The PLO says there are now 5 million refugees. In early June 1948, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was told by Yossef Weitz of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) that 335,000 Arabs fled. A comprehensive report by the Hagana's intelligence service, comprising a detailed village-by-village breakdown of the exodus, set the number of Palestinian Arab evacuees between December 1, 1947, and June 1, 1948, at 391,000. This estimate was substantially higher than the 360,000 figure in the report of the UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, submitted to the General Assembly on September 16, or the revised estimate of 400,300 a couple of weeks later by Sir Raphael Cilento, director of the UN Disaster Relief Project (DRP) in Palestine, and was virtually identical to the supplementary report submitted on October 18 by Bernadotte's successor, Ralph Bunche, which set the number of refugees at 472,000 and anticipated the figure to reach a maximum of slightly over 500,000.
2011-04-15 00:00:00
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