**Palaw ** is a town in the Tanintharyi Region, Myanmar. It is the administrative seat of Palaw Township. In 1948, a Bamar militia group threw hand-grenades into a Christmas Eve service in Palaw and killed 80 ethnic Karen churchgoers. This incident and existing interracial tensions sparked a series of retaliatory incidents and massacres between Bamar and Karen ethnic groups that culminated in the declaration of the Karen conflict war by the Karen National Union.