‘Scars on every street’: the refugee camp where generations of Palestinians have lost their futures
Last year, Kamal took his eldest son, Hassan, to meet a people smuggler. Kamal had made up his mind: he had to find a way to get his son, who was 21, out of Shatila refugee camp in southern Beirut, where three generations of his family had now spent their whole lives. “I wanted him to leave not because of the financial situation – thank God we are doing OK – but I sent him away to escape life in this camp,” Kamal told me recently. “There is no future here for the young.”
Kamal, a man in his late 40s, with broad shoulders, an angular jaw and dark curly hair, is a marginally wellto-do businessman within the impoverished confines of Shatila. He owns a small shop that sells mobile phones and cosmetics. Even so, to come up with the $5,000 demanded by the smuggler, he had to borrow a hefty sum, in addition to spending all his savings. Recounting the story, Kamal spoke quickly, jamming sentences together. His face was gaunt and dark circles framed his eyes. He looked exhausted.
Hassan set off on his journey to Europe in May 2023. First he flew to Cairo, then he was driven through the desert into Libya. At that point, Hassan called his father and told him that he and his fellow migrants were being held in a barn, while they waited for the boat to take them across the Mediterranean. “I called the smuggler and told him to move my son into a hotel and I will pay extra,” Kamal recalled. After 10 days in the hotel, the smuggler loaded the refugees on to a fishing trawler heading to Italy.
As we talked, Kamal sat with a couple of friends, perched uneasily on small plastic stools in a dark alleyway so narrow that every time a scooter whizzed past, the men had to bring their knees to their chests and turn sideways. The sun shone over Beirut, but little light trickled down to where Kamal sat. No walls surround the Shatila refugee camp. No barbed wires, watchtowers or checkpoints, at least not any more, prevent people from entering or leaving. But a mix of draconian laws, discrimination and prejudice has ensured that Shatila feels as claustrophobic as any camp enclosed by high concrete walls.
For Kamal, his son’s journey was just another episode in a displacement saga that had begun nearly eight decades ago. Like his parents before, and his children after, Kamal is a stateless Palestinian refugee whose life has withered away in the alleyways of Shatila. The same was true of the friends seated with Kamal.
On the walls around these men, layers and layers of history were visible: in graffitied slogans, the stencilled image of the Dome of the Rock, and in the hundreds of portraits of old leaders, from Yasser Arafat and the 1970s militants with their long sideburns, to a younger generation of fighters in combat fatigues – all slain, and celebrated as “heroes and martyrs” to be emulated by the next generation – to the pictures of Abu Ubaida, the current military spokesperson for Hamas.
In a time when far-right members of Israel’s government openlycall for the people of Gaza to be displaced, sent into neighbouring countries or further afield, we do not need to imagine what life would be like for most of these Palestinians forced into exile. We already know. This displacement has happened once before. To see what that grim future might be like, just look at Shatila.
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The words “refugee camp” conjure an image of a few hundred tents, something temporary to house a population in need. Shatila, with its population of more than 14,000 – some estimates go as high as 30,000 – is more like a small city within a city, and it has been here for more than 70 years. In the last decade, its population has rocketed. Syrians fleeing the civil war, as well as poverty-stricken Lebanese, Ethiopian, Eritrean and Bangladeshi migrant workers have all found shelter in the camp, which is now a densely populated slum. Squeezed between a major highway and a stadium not far from the centre of Beirut, it has nowhere to expand but vertically. New flats have been stacked precariously on top of each other, each slightly bigger than the one below, forming multistorey buildings whose top-floor windows kiss those on the other side of the alleyway. Stairs sprout from balconies, and beams stretch out, creating underpasses below.
For most of its history, Palestinian residents of the camp were segregated from the rest of Beirut. But the recent economic meltdown in Lebanon has brought the city to the doorsteps of Shatila. The main thoroughfare, where stalls sell fruit and vegetables, shoes, clothes and kitchenware, is cheaper than anywhere else in Beirut. On a recent visit, it seemed as if every available nook between buildings at street level had been turned into a grocery shop or a place for carts selling sweets to schoolchildren, who shouted and laughed as they manoeuvred between mopeds, their Unicef school bags bobbing up and down on their shoulders.
The camp’s origins go back to 1949, when a group of Palestinian refugees pitched their tent on a piece of wasteland on the outskirts of Beirut. Within weeks, more families, mainly from the Galilee, had settled there, and the International Committee of the Red Cross recognised it as one of the 17 camps housing about 100,000 Palestinian refugees who had fled to Lebanon, drifting through the villages of the south or arriving by boat in Beirut.
A small minority of the newcomers – middle-class or well-connected – were offered Lebanese citizenship; the rest, poor peasants like Kamal’s grandfather, were dispersed into camps. By then, the state of Israel was secure in most of historical Palestine, having defeated the ramshackle Arab armies who opposed Israel’s creation and completed the expulsion of more than 700,000 people in an exodus that became known to Arabs as the Nakba, or catastrophe. The images of the long caravans of people, driven from their ancestral towns and villages by the nascent Israeli state, marching towards their destiny as stateless refugees, carrying bundles and clutching the hands of children, would be seared on the collective memory not only of the Palestinians, but the region as a whole.
At first, clusters of tents, and sometimes whole camps, formed around traditional leaders and village elders. As much as the conditions of displacement and exile permitted, these camps recreated the communities back home. Over time, as these refugee camps expanded, they became ghettoes and shantytowns. Their continued existence was testimony to the historical injustice inflicted on their inhabitants. Yet, as such, the camps became a repository of memory, which conserved and perpetuated a Palestine national identity in exile.
When the first wave of Palestinian refugees arrived, they constituted about 10% of the entire population of Lebanon, and the Lebanese political and security establishment feared that the new arrivals would disturb the balance of power in the sectarian state, and challenge the Maronite Christian dominance. The army’s intelligence department was tasked with controlling the refugee camps through harsh surveillance, intimidation and repression.
For nearly two decades, most Palestinian refugees in Lebanon lived in wretched hovels of stones and wooden boards, with corrugated zinc sheeting and canvas roofs. Initially some of the refugees were suspicious of any permanent structure built by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), firm in their belief that their exile was temporary. But even when they were disabused of this idea, the Lebanese authorities prevented crucial building materials, such as cement, from entering the camps. They would not allow the refugees to construct anything that looked too permanent. This policy was ostensibly to “encourage the refugees to return” – as if they could simply do so by choice. Lebanon also imposed, and continues to impose, severe restrictions on the refugees’ basic rights to work. The only available employment outside the camps was casual menial labour, where exploitation was common.
In the 60s – and especially after 1967, when Israel defeated Egypt, Jordan and Syria in the six-day war – the struggle for “the liberation of Palestine” shifted from the corrupt and ineffective Arab regimes to Palestinian revolutionary organisations such as Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. These factions, ostensibly working together under the umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, but often bickering and doing the bidding of their corrupt Arab regime sponsors, found in a new generation of refugees born in the shanties of exile – shunned, despised and segregated from the society around them – an eager youth ready to reverse the injustices of the Nakba and yearning for a return to a homeland they had never seen.
In Lebanon’s refugee camps, these factions replaced traditional relationships with patronage networks based on party loyalty, and gradually the Palestinians – who were perhaps the least sectarian of all Arab people – were sucked into the quagmire of sectarian Lebanese politics. Naturally they found themselves aligned to the leftists and mainly Muslim parties who challenged Maronite Christian dominance. Meanwhile, the Maronite Christian Phalange party and other rightwing Christian organisations found an ally in the Israelis. In the Lebanese civil war, which lasted from 1975 until 1990, the Palestinians became just another armed faction, albeit the strongest one. And it was during this period that the name of Shatila – and neighbouring Sabra – became synonymous with one of the worst atrocities of the war.
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On my visit to Shatila in November last year, I met a woman, Suhaila, who vividly recalled the events of September 1982, when militias linked to the Phalange party, under the watchful eye of their Israeli military allies, rampaged through the alleyways of the camp for three days, slaughtering and raping hundreds of civilians, many of them women and children, while the Israeli soldiers stood by. (By then Palestinian fighters under the leadership of Yasser Arafat had left the city, under the terms of a US-sponsored deal that brought an end to months of Israeli bombardment of Beirut.)
“We were sitting at home when we heard people screaming, ‘They are here, they have entered the camp,’” recalled Suhaila, as she sat in a her small and tidy living room. A whiff of detergent and fresh Turkish coffee filled the room.
“My mother-in-law, who was staying with us, told my husband to go and see what was happening. The screaming became louder and I followed him outside. I saw a woman running towards us and dragging a child behind her. She was shouting, ‘They burned my husband in a barrel and shot his cousin.’ The child was screaming, and then I saw she was holding her intestines in her hand – her stomach was slashed open.”
Suhaila and her family fled, finding safety in an adjacent neighbourhood. When they returned to the camp a few days later, journalists and the Red Cross were uncovering the scale of the massacre. “When I came back to our house I saw knives on the floor. They were clean, but I became hysterical and started screaming, even though they were just our kitchen knives,” Suhaila said, laughing. She volunteered with the Red Cross and spent days going from house to house collecting corpses and limbs.
She poured coffee, and continued her war stories of bombardments and sieges by the Christians, the Shia, the Syrians and even by other Palestinian factions. She laughed again, and said that all her sons and daughters had been born in underground shelters during one battle or another.
One such battle occurred in 1986, at the start of a six-month siege by Amal Shia forces at the instigation of their Syrian masters. During a heavy bombardment of shelling, Suhaila’s eldest son, who was nine, was torn to pieces by an artillery shell.
“We have no grave for him, because he was buried with others in a mass grave, in the main mosque,” Suhaila said. “Whenever I pass by that mosque I hold the door and pray for him.”
By the end of the siege, nearly every building in Shatila was levelled. Suhaila could only identify her own house from a section of the kitchen wall that she had painted blue.
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Sitting in the living room listening to Suhaila narrate her war memories was a friend of her youngest son, who was in his mid-20s. Afterwards, downstairs in the alleyway in front of the building, he lowered his head, pressing his long bushy beard against chest, and said in a low, almost inaudible tone, as if Suhaila could hear him from her sixthfloor apartment: “The old people keep talking about the history of the war. Fine, they suffered, but what is happening now in the camp is worse than any war. Young men are dying from drugs. A whole generation is wasting their lives because of the drugs and the poverty.” He was thin and slightly built with tired eyes. He said he spent his days shuffling three menial jobs, and still could not make ends meet.
He lit a cigarette and, as if to prove his point, he led the way down a maze of dark alleyways, barely wide enough for one person, and came to a stop in front of a shop with a large bare window. A row of half a dozen hookah pipes lined the door like a guard of honour.
Inside, two sofas were arranged in one corner, and a large TV screen hung on the grimy wall opposite. On one sofa sat three teenage boys, dressed in black, trying to look tough. On the other sat a very thin young man. His face was sallow under the bright neon light. Most of his teeth were missing, and the rest were black and rotten. He sank a bit deeper into the threadbare sofa, spreading his two emaciated arms, and leaning his head forward, he told me: “I am 23 and I have already spent two years in prison,” before adding with pride: “My name is on the wanted list at very single checkpoint from here and all the way to the Beqaa [valley].”
The boys, who were between 13 and 17 years old, looked at him with awe.
“We can get you any kind of drugs here in the camp, and they are much cheaper than in Beirut,” the man continued: coke, MDMA, heroin, hash and all kinds of pills. The more expensive varieties were for the people who lived in the city. The poor kids in the camps limited themselves to the cheaper and more potent synthetics. “What else can we do? There are no jobs here. Look at those boys – the minute they leave the camp they will be harassed by the army and police, so we just sit here,” the dealer told me.
He said he was a just mid-level dealer, and only did business with friends and acquaintances, and that it was mostly to pay for his own drugs. “A friend comes to me, says I want coke or hash, I get it to him and I get myself a bit extra.” He said he made about $1,000 a week. $500 was his capital, and $500 his profit, which he then split with one of the “factions”. “They take half of my profit as their cut, $250 for them and $250 for me.”
“Who are they?” I asked.
“The armed factions ruling the camp. You must work with a faction for protection, no matter which one. Without their protection you can’t do business here. And it’s not only the Palestinians who are involved in this. The Lebanese security forces are all in this business. How do you think the drugs come here all the way from the Beqaa or Syria? There are dozens of checkpoints along the road. We even get things delivered through the airport.”
He laid his merchandise beside him: a few plastic sachets filled with white powder. “We have as much hashish as you want,” he said. From a pocket inside his jacket he pulled a small paper cone, opened it to reveal a small amount of a pale green, herb-like drug called salvia, and started rolling a joint. “That’s what we smoke in here – it’s cheap and makes you forget everything around you.”
Not far from the shop, a few men – mostly old, with greying beards, wearing ammunition webbings tight over their paunchy bellies and carrying old Kalashnikovs – stood guard outside their faction’s headquarters: which were decorated with the faction’s flag, and its once-idolised martyrs. Collectively these factions run the security of the camps, which lie outside the jurisdiction of the Lebanese state. Like their guns, they men were relics of the old struggle. Today, they seem to exist solely to collect protection money.
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In Shatila, the signs of misery were everywhere. In a small ground-floor room, a grieving old mother dressed in black sat upright on her bed, staring at a bare wall. A neighbour told me that her only son, who was 25, had died two weeks ago. He had developed complications from a botched appendectomy, but no hospital would admit him, I was told, because he and his mother had no money to pay. Nearby, another older woman sat in her tiny room, crowded with two bunk beds, where a small brood of children shivered under thin blankets. They were the children of her son, who was killed by rebels in Syria a few years ago.
On the main road, two cows and a few sheep, their fleeces blackened with dirt, were slowly grazing on heaps of rubbish while two small children played quietly, having discovered a small plastic toy in one of the rubbish bags. In the distance, a man sifted through the rubbish, looking for food.
Amid the camp’s dejection and squalor, there were also pockets of hope. In one basement, a young girl with her hair raised in a bun was walking between the rows of two dozen children, going over their homework with them. “The UNRWA schools are so packed that the children don’t get a proper education. We volunteer here to help them study,” she said, adding that she was in her last year studying social sciences at university. “We have no option but to study.”
The scars of past wars could be glimpsed on every street – from the missing arm of the old fighter selling tomatoes to the facades of buildings hacked away by heavy gunfire. These scars had never healed, and the residents’ traumas never addressed, instead merely rekindled generation after generation – more atrocities, more oppression, new pictures of “martyrs” added to the old ones. These new martyrs belonged to a younger generation of men, killed not in the camps or in wars of Lebanon, but in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel.
Next to some graffiti depicting the last words of 18-year-old Ibrahim alNabulsi, a fighter killed in Nablus in an Israeli raid two years ago – “No one should leave the gun” – a group of young schoolchildren dumped their school bags and stood in line. One of them wore oversized military boots and khaki pants and wrapped his face with a keffiyeh. He gave an order, marching his troop of little boys up and