Is it older than Israel?

Lydda and Ramla were two towns of some 50,000 to 70,000 people, swollen with refugees, on the road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. On 12 July 1948, after Israeli forces had taken Lydda the day before and a brief resistance had broken out, Yitzhak Rabin, then operations chief, issued the order: "The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age."

In Lydda that day soldiers fired into the Dahmash mosque, where men had taken shelter, and killed dozens; the town's own dead that day are put at 250 or more. Then the population of both towns was marched east towards the Arab Legion's lines in the July heat, carrying what they could, and stripped of valuables at checkpoints on the way. Nobody counted the dead on the road. The Israeli journalist Ari Shavit, in 2013, called Lydda "the black box" of Zionism.

Lydda is Lod. Ramla is Ramla. Their Palestinian populations fell from tens of thousands to about a thousand.