For nearly 70 years, Arabs have been claiming Israel owes land claims to refugees who have been kept in squalid camps from created in the wake of wars dating back to 1948.

Now, following 18 months of research, Israeli officials have put together compensation claims of their own to seven Arab nations plus Iran totaling $250 billion for more than 800,000 Jews forced out of their lands.

The research is based on the value of actual property seized by the nations after forcing out the Jewish refugees, including $35 billion from Tunisia and $15 billion from Libya.

"The time has come to correct the historic injustice of the pogroms (against Jews) in seven Arab countries and Iran, and to restore, to hundreds of thousands of Jews who lost their property, what is rightfully theirs," said Israel's Minister for Social Equality Gila Gamliel, who is coordinating the Israeli government's handling of the issue.

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The other nations cited by the report include Morocco, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Yemen and Iran.

Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, an international umbrella group of Jewish community organizations, has estimated that some 856,000 Jews from 10 Arab countries – the other two were Algeria and Lebanon – fled or were expelled in 1948 and after, while violent Arab riots left many Jews dead or injured.

For the past 18 months, utilizing the services of an international accountancy firm, the Israeli government has quietly been researching the value of property and assets that these Jews were forced to leave behind.

The report comes as the Trump administration prepares to unveil its Israeli-Palestinian peace proposal, the report is expected to take a bold new approach to the talks. A 2010 Israeli law provides that any peace deal must provide for compensation for assets of Jewish communities and individual Jews forced out of Arab countries and Iran.

"One cannot talk about the Middle East without taking into consideration the rights of the Jews who were forced to leave their thriving communities amid violence," said Gamliel, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party. "All the crimes that were carried out against those Jewish communities must be recognized."

The Palestinian Authority has sought over $100 billion in compensation from Israel for assets left behind by Arab residents of what is today Israel who fled or were forced to leave at the time of the establishment of the Jewish state, and presented documentation to that effect to the United States a decade ago.

In addition, the Palestinians have also always demanded a “right of return” to what is today’s Israel for the few tens of thousands of surviving refugees and for their millions of descendants.

However, this would effectively spell the end of Israel as the one and only sovereign Jewish nation. Israel argues Palestinian refugees would become citizens of a Palestinian state under a permanent peace accord, just as Jewish refugees from Arab lands became citizens of Israel.

Israel has never formally demanded compensation for Jews forced out of Arab lands and Iran, and although many of those Jews arrived in Israel with next to nothing, they did not seek formal refugee status from the international community.

At the time, the newly established Jewish state was struggling to attract migration from the world’s Jews and to project its legitimacy as a sovereign state, able to care for its own people. Its first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, would not have wanted Jews returning to their “historic homeland” classed as refugees, according to Meir Kahlon, chairman of the Central Organization for Jews from Arab Countries and Iran.

In 2014, Israel passed a law making each November 30 a day commemorating the exit and deportation of Jews from Arab and Iranian lands, which involves educational programming and diplomatic events aimed to increase international awareness of the issue of Jewish refugees from Arab lands and Iran, and of their right to compensation.

That year, at the first such events, Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin issued calls for financial reparations.

Some of the migrants to Israel say privately that the issue is being promoted to give Israel a bargaining card in negotiations with the Palestinians, to set against Palestinian compensation claims for property and assets left behind in what is now Israel.