Before the Nakba: Images of Palestine then and now

Palestinian houses and cinemas, shops and mosques, train stations and markets were all lost in 1948, when hundreds of thousands were driven from their homes amid the violence of the Nakba.

Tarek Bakri, a researcher and archivist based in Jerusalem, was moved by the nostalgia and emotion still felt by many displaced Palestinians for their former streets and neighbourhoods and has tried to shed light on how Palestine looked before the Nakba.

“They live in the refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon,” he told MEE. “They contact me via social media and send me pictures of their homes. I go out to find them and take pictures of how they ended up. It was not a desert, as the first Zionist settlers believed."

More of Bakri's before and after images can be found here.