- Title: LEBANON: Palestinians lose more than most in Syrian exodus
- Date: 11th November 2013
- Summary: SIDON, LEBANON (RECENT) (REUTERS) WIDE OF AIN AL-HELWEH PALESTINIAN CAMP NEAR THE PORT-CITY OF SIDON VARIOUS OF TENTS IN AIN AL-HELWEH CAMP VARIOUS OF CHILDREN MILLING ABOUT BETWEEN TENTS (SOUNDBITE) (Arabic) PALESTINIAN FROM SYRIA, EM JAMAL, SAYING: "We lived in Yarmouk camp, all of us Palestinians displaced since 1948. We came here to Lebanon and first of all I got a n
- Embargoed: 26th November 2013 12:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Lebanon
- Country: Lebanon
- Topics: Conflict,International Relations,Politics,Social Services / Welfare
- Reuters ID: LVACD01KYEKJVYEH9PJ3N63E4LNN
- Story Text: Palestinians fleeing the deadly ongoing Syrian crisis and sheltering at camps in neighbouring Lebanon face restrictions on their lives far more severe than any other refugees. Barred from working in over 70 professions and subject to major measures on access to state services for many hope for the future is bleak.
Lebanon, the smallest of Syria's neighbours, is giving sanctuary to the largest number of refugees from the civil war across its border and Syrians now number around a quarter of its own population of just over 4 million.
With a weak government and threadbare national services even before the Syrian crisis erupted two and a half years ago, Lebanon is struggling to support those refugees, scattered in informal camps across the country's most deprived areas.
But Palestinians from Syria are believed to be among the groups most disadvantaged as result of the ongoing conflict.
Some Palestinian families pay large fees to smugglers to help them escape Syria only to face further hardship as they seek safety in neighbouring countries.
A people all too familiar with refugee life, Palestinians have lost out more than most in the exodus from Syria.
"We lived in Yarmouk camp, all of us Palestinians displaced since 1948," said Em Jamal, a Palestinian refugee from Syria, recently displaced to Ain al-Helweh.
"We came here to Lebanon and first of all I got a normal permit. They didn't let me in, I was made to wait for three hours under the sun at the Lebanese borders, because they wouldn't allow me to enter. I paid 3000 Syrian pounds for the car and they wouldn't allow me to enter. Later, an officer in the next work shift allowed me to enter (Lebanon) after I told him that my sister was sick and had a surgery in Ain al-Helweh. So I came here, I have been here for 20 days and nobody has helped me with anything," she added.
At the Lebanese camp of Ain al-Helweh, Palestinian families face restrictions on their lives far more severe than any other refugees from Syria.
The war has forced some 50,000 Palestinians to flee Syria, a country where they had enjoyed some of the most favourable treatment in all of the Arab world.
The number is a sliver of the 700,000 registered Syrian refugees in Lebanon, but enough to strain overcrowded and volatile camps and stir memories of Lebanon's own civil war; a conflict some see rooted in the arrival of armed Palestinian factions in the decades after Israel's foundation in 1948.
"Eid passed for us as if nothing had happened, we felt none of the joy of Eid," said another Palestinian refugee from Syria, Abdallah Khaled.
"Look at our situation, no one cares about us. Honestly, we were happy inside the Syrian territories, the situation changed for us in here. There is no electricity or anything, just insects," he added.
Palestinians face a particularly hard time in Lebanon because they are barred from working in over 70 professions and are subject to major restrictions on property ownership and access to state services.
The coastal country also faces its own crippling political disputes and an economy hammered by the loss of tourism and business because of Syria's civil war.
Mohammed Ali, a refugee at Ain al-Helweh says the system does not favour newcomers to the camps, because it denies them aid when the need for it is most acute.
"We have 125 families here, including children, women and men, everyone. And the number is still increasing. I came here three months ago, three or four families related to us through my parents in Damascus have come here to me. When a family comes from outside I, as a resident, receive some aid, but not the family itself that has arrived. It takes time for them to receive aid if they stay here, but actually when they first arrive that is when they need the aid the most," said Ali.
Arrival for new families to Lebanon's Palestinian areas, still called "camps", can be especially hard for refugees from Syria, where they had had access to schools, healthcare and government jobs. The hopelessness occasionally inspires spectacular acts of desperation.
Noufa Mokhtar Sallem, a 55-year-old Palestinian from Syria, fled to Ain al-Helweh, Lebanon's largest camp, about a year ago after shelling gutted her family's four-storey home in Damascus.
She and two of her sons settled in a dirt lot in a tent of plastic sheeting and wooden planks, around the corner from a neighbourhood run by a faction of radical Islamists.
Sallem's husband, a teacher with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, founded in 1949 to help Arabs fleeing Israel, died of a heart attack before they left Damascus.
Then in September she found out her third son, who stayed in Syria because he had not done his military service, had been killed. She had not spoken to him since fleeing and learned about his death through a news website.
Seated outside her tent, Sallem's outlook on the future appears bleak.
"The rain is coming; the cold is coming; the winter season is coming and the winter season here is so hard. These tents do not provide shelter from the cold, wind, rain or anything. There is no electricity, no water and making use of the bathrooms will be hard during winter since they are far. The situation is very, very bad for us as displaced Palestinians, we left Yarmouk camp only to come to Ain al-Helweh camp," said Sallem.
In Lebanon, Palestinian refugees are essentially trapped between two countries bent on maintaining demographic equations that exclude them.
Lebanese officials fear assimilating the mostly Sunni Palestinians would upset the balance between Sunnis, Shi'ites and Christians that underpins Lebanon's political hierarchy.
For many refugees who have had to flee two or three times, hope has already faded. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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