Images of Lebanon's Palestinian Refugee Camps

A vision of home; a painting of the British Mandate of Palestine pre-1948 and a young man with a rock. The young man walking in the foreground has never been to the land he calls home, he was born in Lebanon, so were his parents, but he is a Palestinian Refugee and is denied citizenship. Lebanon will never let him work in a professional occupation or own property, the only thing Palestinians in Lebanon can inherit are the memories they construct from the stories they hear about the home they were expelled from 62 years ago.


Fourth Generation Palestinian Refugee, Tripoli Refugee Camp, Lebanon.
I was brought to this "library" to use the only toilet in the camp. It was a hole in the ground, with an outside tap plumbed onto the wall behind a broken door at the back of this shop.


Entrance to a Palestinian familiy home. With overcrowding endemic (Ein El Hilweh camp is around two square kilometres and houses over 70,000 people) it is common for families of 12 to share a single room dwelling.

Children in Shatila Refugee Camp in Lebanon. In 1982, during the Lebanese civil war, the area within which Shatila and Sabra refugee camps lie was occupied by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). In a deal with the IDF, all of the Palestinian men left the camps, to protect the women and children from the conflict. The IDF allowed Lebanese Christian paramilitaries to enter the camps, in which only women, children and the elderly remained. The refugees were savagely massacred. Women, children, old people, even animals were slaughtered in what was later recognised by the UN as an act of genocide. New inhabitants moved to the camp after the war. Life still goes on there, children play in the rocks and rubble of the buildings destroyed in the fighting. People live among the ghosts, knowing the place where they sleep at night is the site of a massacre of defenceless people.

'Robert Fisk wrote in the UK Independent on January 16, 2010 after a camp visit: “ The Sabra and Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camps are repulsive, obscene, outrageous, filthy, stinking slums and a place of such squalor that the gorge rises that human beings even live there.” The reason why Lebanon’s 12 Palestinian Refugee camps are the worst of the 58 camps in the Middle East is due primarily to the fact that unlike occupied Palestine, Jordan, and Syria, Palestinians in Lebanon do not possess the most basic civil rights.' (Palestine Civil Rights Campaign)

Children play in the rubble surrounding their home in a Palestinian Refugee Camp in Lebanon. Too young to remember the civil war, Palestinian children grow up surrounded by destruction, a constant reminder of the massacres their people suffered during the Lebanese civil war from 1975 - 1990.

And somehow, through all the destruction, injustice and want, children will be born and they will laugh and they will play. That is the human spirit and that is why life goes on.

Leah Williams