"Perpetual hell" of the Palestinian refugee camps > Palestine > Redress Information & Analysis

"Perpetual hell" of the Palestinian refugee camps > Palestine > Redress Information & Analysis

Stuart Littlewood turns the spotlight on the appalling conditions of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon – robbed of their inalienable right to a homeland by the Israeli occupation and denied their civil and human rights by the Lebanese authorities.

A delegation of parliamentarians has returned from a tour of the refugee camps in Lebanon and made its report.

It was led by former British government minister Sir Gerald Kaufman MP and included four members of the European Parliament and three of the British Parliament. The delegation's purpose was to assess the humanitarian situation faced by Palestinians living in Lebanon's refugee camps, and it was able to raise issues at the highest level with the Lebanese in a series of meetings.

The UN Refugee Agency describes the plight of Palestinian refugees as "by far the most protracted and largest of all refugee problems in the world today".

“Law and principle are utterly meaningless to the great, civilized powers, who just fidget and whisper sweet nothings in Israel’s ear.”

Three-quarters of the 11 million Palestinians are refugees. Their plight is at the core of the 63-year struggle against Israel. All other issues, political and humanitarian, arose as a consequence of Israel's denial of the right of refugees to return to their land.

The report reminds us that a whole host of international treaties and conventions recognize the right to return, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination and the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights. The right of return for refugees is guaranteed under Humanitarian and Human Rights Law and countless UN resolutions.

And the UN has affirmed the right of return through its Resolution 194 on no less than 122 occasions.

But to the international community none of this is worth the screeds of paper it is written on. Law and principle are utterly meaningless to the great, civilised powers, who just fidget and whisper sweet nothings in Israel’s ear.

Meanwhile, over 400,000 Palestinians live in Lebanon's 12 “official” UNRWA-run refugee camps and its many “unofficial” camps, amounting to approximately 10 per cent of the country's population. They are politically marginalized, without basic social and economic rights, trapped in often squalid surroundings, and without hopes for the future.

Palestinian refugees, says the report, suffer more in Lebanon than in any other country that hosts them.