BEIRUT — When Shadi Mawlawi and Osama Mansour escaped their native city of Tripoli in November during clashes between the Lebanese army and the local, armed militant groups they led, they found refuge among Salafist factions inside the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp in Sidon. Lebanese troops have only rarely ventured into the Palestinian camps, despite the 1987 abrogation of the 1969 Cairo Agreement between the Palestinian leadership and the Lebanese government that the army refrain from entering them. Mawlawi and Mansour, the most wanted men in Lebanon, have been charged in absentia with belonging to an armed terrorist group with the intent to carry out attacks. Amid recent rumors that the Islamic State (IS) is planning to declare an emirate in Lebanon, many fear the group might make an appeal to some of the Palestinian factions there to join forces.
Palestinian individuals have been identified among the perpetrators involved in a series of car bombs and suicide attacks targeting Lebanese army and Hezbollah strongholds in the past few years. In one incident in February 2014, Nidal al-Mghayer, a Sidon resident with relatives in Ain al-Hilweh, was identified as the driver of a car bomb that exploded outside the Iranian Cultural Center in Beirut. Those carrying out the attacks do not like that the Iranian-backed Shiite Hezbollah is fighting alongside the Syrian army against predominantly Sunni rebels in the ongoing civil war in Syria, and they complain that the operations conducted by the Lebanese army only target Sunni groups.
