GAZA CITY, Palestine 

Dozens of Palestinians staged a march on Friday – organized by resistance faction Hamas – in the city of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip to mark the 67th anniversary of the 1948 Palestinian "Nakba."

Marchers gathered near the Israeli border in the town of Al-Qarara in eastern Khan Younis, where they waved Palestinian flags and chanted slogans in which they vowed to eventually return to their ancestral homeland.

"The Palestinian people and resistance groups will not give up their right to return to the land from which they were forcibly evicted in 1948 by the Zionist occupation," Hamas spokesman Hammad al-Raqab told Anadolu Agency on the sidelines of the demonstration.

Al-Raqab asserted that the "leaders of the Zionist occupation" had hoped that "the passing away of Palestinians who lived through the 1948 Nakba would bring an end to the issue."

"This, however, was not the case, as the older generation passed down to their grandchildren their right to demand the retrieval of the land and villages from which they were evicted," he added.

On May 15 of each year, Palestinians mark "Nakba Day" – when the state of Israel was founded – to reaffirm their right to return to the land from which their ancestors were forcibly displaced by Zionist groups in 1948.

The term "Nakba" – "catastrophe" in Arabic – is used by Palestinians to denote their mass expulsion and displacement from their ancestral homes and land in historical Palestine in 1948.

Jews commemorate the same occasion as Israel's "Independence Day."