According to the 2009 records of the Ministry of Interior’s Directorate of Palestinian Refugees, about 475,000 Palestinian refugees live across Lebanon’s six governorates. They live inside and outside of Lebanon’s 12 refugee camps that were created after the catastrophe of 1948, the displacement of 1967 and Jordan’s Black September of 1970. At the beginning of the 1970s, the official number of camps in Lebanon was 15, however between 1974 and 1976 three of them (Al-Nabatiyah al-Tahta, Tel al-Zaatar and Jisr al-Basha) were destroyed by Israeli shelling and the Lebanese Civil War. Only 12 now remain, and they include the following:

1.     Rashidiyeh houses 29,000 refugees and is located seven kilometers south of Tyre. Being the closest camp to Palestine, it was repeatedly exposed to Israeli shelling, especially during the Israeli invasion of 1982. The government of the French Mandate established the camp in 1939 to house Armenian refugees. However in 1948, it began accepting Palestinian refugees. In 1964, refugees began flowing in from Gouraud Barracks in Baalbek, coming mainly from the district of Safed and Haifa city and its environs.

2.     Burj al-Shamali was created in 1955, and is located near the village of Burj al-Shamali, three kilometers to the east of Tyre. Its total population is estimated at 19,000 people, and most of the refugees are from the villages of Hula and Tiberias. In 1994, Lebanese citizenship was granted to the former residents of 25 villages of the Hula district, and many of them live in this camp. In recent years, the population has declined resulting from increased migration to Scandinavia. The camp was exposed to a terrible massacre which occurred at the Hula Club shelter in 1982 during the Israeli invasion of South Lebanon, which claimed 100 lives.

3.     Al-Bas is located at the eastern entrance of Tyre and houses a population of about 12,000 people, a large part of which come from non-Palestinian backgrounds. Most of the refugees come from villages in the districts of Acre, Nazareth, the Hula and Galilee. The camp was established in 1939 to house Armenian refugees, and in 1948 it turned into a Palestinian refugee camp.