Days of fighting in the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon displaced several hundred families, destroyed up to 400 houses and left half the camp still off-limits and considered “a hot area,” a senior UN official said Thursday.
Dorothee Klaus, Director of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, said she was able to visit part of the Ein el-Hilweh camp for the first time earlier this week and met with traumatized children and women, some whose hair turned white during the hostilities.
The fighting between members of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah group and militants of Islamic groups at Ein el-Hilweh near the southern port of Sidon that began July 30 and ended August 3 left 13 people dead and dozens wounded.
Klaus said “the camp remains unstable,” with the Lebanese military barring access to half the camp because armed fighters are still positioned there and it’s not safe though hostilities have ceased.
She told UN journalists at a video press conference that the UN agency, known as UNRWA, has reopened services in about 50 per cent of the camp which includes one health centre, but a school complex for over 3,000 children was also damaged.
“We’ve been collecting garbage, disinfecting, and started removing rubble,” she said, and when the other half of the camp reopens the first thing will be to remove unexploded ordnance and remnants of war.
Ein el-Hilweh, which is home to over 50,000 Palestinian refugees, is one of a dozen refugee camps in Lebanon. The country has between 200,000 and 250,000 Palestinian refugees, half living in camps and the rest in the vicinity, she said.
Violent clashes are a regular occurrence and many camps have been destroyed several times, Klaus said, pointing to previous clashes in Ein el-Hilweh in March.
She said the violence “needs to be understood in the context of multiple displacements” Palestinian refugees have experienced over the past 75 years in Lebanon. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled from what is now Israel following the UN’s partition of British-ruled Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states in 1948.
