RAFAH: At age 89, Palestinian Liga Jabr remembers how conflict uprooted her family when she was a child. Now, 75 years later, she says the brutality raging in Gaza is even worse.

`This war is harder than any of the displacements` brought by previous conflicts, Jabr said in Rafah refugee camp, on the besieged Gaza Strip`s southern border with Egypt.

Staying with relatives after her home in central Gaza`s Deir el-Balah was hit by a strike, Jabr is among an estimated 1.9 million Palestinians forced from their homes since crisis erupted on Oct 7 in the Hamas-ruled territory.

Sitting by a small wooden table in a house crowded with family members, she said she has felt fear like never before as the crisis entered its 100th day.

`To be honest... Pm afraid,` she said. `I have never seen a war like this one. This war is disgraceful.` The violence has spurred concerns that Israel is trying to expel Palestinians, but Israeliofficials deny this.

That scenario evokes dark historical memories of what the Arab world calls the `Nakba` or catastrophe the mass displacement of Palestinians during the war that coincided with Israel`s creation in 1948.

The majority of Gaza`s 2.4 million inhabitants are descendents of some of the 760,000 Palestinians driven out during that war.

Some, like Jabr, have now lived through both conflicts.

`Destroying entire houses` In 1948 Israeli soldiers `did not kill us in the Nal(ba`, she said, recalling how her family left on footfrom the Palestinian village of Julis, now in southern Israel, just over 10 kilometres north of the Gaza Strip.

`Now the Israelis are hitting people from the air and destroying entire houses,` Jabr added as drones buzzed outside. She lost about a dozen relatives when her house in Deir elBalah was `demolished` in an air strike, she said.

Rayga Abu Aweideh, a relative of Jabr who like her had to leave her home in what is now southern Israel in 1948, said the current war is `harder and crueller`.

Seventy-five years after fleeing Al-Majdal with her family and two cows, andeventually settling in southern Gaza`s Khan Yunis, Abu Aweideh was displaced again, taking shelter at her daughter`s home in Rafah.

Born in 1935, Abu Aweideh said the current unrest has extinguished any hope of ever returning to her hometown, and that now she wouldn`t want to flee Gaza. `Even if they tell me, `take all the money in the world`, I will never leave for Sinai or anywhere else,` she said, referring to the Egyptian peninsula bordering the Palestinian territory. `I want to stay here even if we die.

Always `afraid` Juma Abu Qamar, 80, said he wanted to return to the Palestinian village of Yibna where he was born, now in central Israel, but admitted he didn`t believe it would ever happen. `We had a big house with a fig tree,` he recalled.

During the 1948 war, `we didn`t see the Jewish (soldiers). We walked along the shore until we reached Gaza`.-AFP