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Palestinian Refugee Camps in Lebanon

Mohammad Harfoush surveys the remaining Palestinian refugee camps and residential clusters across Lebanon.
Palestinian women, who had been living at Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, wait outside the Lebanese immigration authority to have their papers stamped at the Lebanese-Syrian border, in al-Masnaa December 18, 2012. More than 1,000 Palestinian refugees living in Syria have crossed into Lebanon in the past 24 hours, a source at the Lebanese border said on Tuesday, after Syrian rebels took control of a Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus. REUTERS/Jamal Saidi  (LEBANON - Tags: POLITICS CIVIL UNREST S

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.

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