Palestinian refugees are inividuals, predominantly Arabs, who fled or were forcibly ejected from their homes from the British Mandate of Palestine during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The term originated during the first Palestinian Exodus (Arabic: النكبة, Nakba, "catastrophe"), the beginning of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) defines a Palestinian refugee as a person "whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict".