AL KAFRAYN, Israel (AFP) - As Israel celebrated its 61st anniversary, some 2,000 people demonstrated on Wednesday for Arab-Israelis’ right of return to the lands from which they were chased in 1948.

The protest took place on the site of Al Kafrayn, an Arab village among the more than 500 that were razed by Israeli forces at the time of the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 on the Palestinian land.

Waving Palestinian flags and banners proclaiming “Right of Return”, the demonstrators marched through a small pine forest and the ruins of the village that was torn to the ground on April 19, 1948.

Some of the families who were forced to abandon their homes at the time resettled elsewhere in Israel while tens of thousands of others fled into exile.

Family members of some of the refugees visited sites of demolished villages on Wednesday just as Israel celebrated the 61st anniversary - in the Hebraic lunar calender - of its creation.

“We have come to tell Israelis we will never forget,” Fatima Chalabi, one of the protesters, told AFP.

Israel has 1.2 million Arab citizens, the descendants of the 160,000 who remained after the creation of the Jewish state.

On May 15, Palestinians and Arab-Israelis mark the anniversary of the Nakba - catastrophe - the term they use to describe the creation of the state of Israel on three-fourth of the territory of historic Palestine.

Some 760,000 Arabs were expelled or fled from their homes during the 1948 war, giving rise to a UN-registered refugee population scattered across the Middle East that today numbers more than 4.6 million.