The Press in Lebanon | “We will never abandon our land”

In Shatila, one of the 12 Palestinian camps in Lebanon, residents follow with anxiety the daily bombings on the Gaza Strip. Refugees in Lebanon since the creation of Israel in 1948, they are still waiting to return home.

(Beirut, Lebanon) In a dark alley in Chatila, Bilal first refuses to speak, before giving in to a long litany full of resentment. “They kill children, women and the elderly. People are sleeping in the streets because they no longer have a home. My heart burns because of what is happening in Gaza. France, the United States and the Arab countries have all agreed to put their hands on our freedom”, shouts the old man with the white beard, who leans feverishly on a cane.

Around him, onlookers have come closer and are applauding wildly. Bilal was born in Palestine in 1941. He was 6 years old during the Nakba (the catastrophe, in Arabic), which marked the forced exodus from Palestine of nearly 800,000 people.

Like him, around 250,000 Palestinians in Lebanon wishing to assert their “right of return” are blocked, according to UN figures. They crowd into 12 poverty camps spread across the country, joined in recent years by Syrian refugees also driven from their country. Here, each war, each offensive revives the hope, maintained from generation to generation for 75 years, that this time, Israel will be defeated and they will be able to return home. Everyone also remembers that this hope was always disappointed.

A lifetime in exile

“Hope that there would be a solution for Palestine returned on October 7. The problems between rival factions that we can have here have stopped. Everyone is behind the same cause now,” underlines Mohamed Afifi, 64, behind the counter of his small grocery store lit by a simple flickering bulb.

“If they wanted to do something, they should have attacked on October 7. Now the Israeli army is ready at the border,” regrets this father of five with a blue polo shirt and white beard.

All his life, Mohamed Afifi supported Fatah, the Palestinian nationalist movement of Yasser Arafat founded in 1959, now largely discredited. But since the deluge of fire that has fallen on Gaza, he believes, like many, that only Hamas is capable of defending the Palestinians. “We live in hope. Our dream is to return home. It’s too late for me, but it’s still possible for my children, they’re the ones who will keep this flame alive.” he explains, before showing the simple crumpled paper stamped by the Lebanese state which serves as his identity document.

His parents were born in Haifa, Palestine. He has spent his entire life in Shatila and works in the grocery store he inherited when his father died. “Even animals shouldn’t live here. The running water is salty, we live in tiny spaces. There is very little electricity and we have no access to utilities. »

Between 11,000 and 14,000 people spread over one square kilometer live together in the Shatila camp, according to United Nations figures. What was just a tent encampment in 1949 gradually transformed into a labyrinthine informal settlement. In the narrow streets where scooters and touk-touks slalom, the tangled electrical cables form a perilous roof. A few weeks earlier, a young man died from electrocution.

On the walls, posters of Yasser Arafat or the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem sit next to those of Hamas or Fatah. Few signs, however, recall the sinister memory of the massacre of Sabra and Chatila, from September 16 to 18, 1982. At the time, between 800 and 2,000 Palestinians and Lebanese were savagely killed by a Christian Phalangist militia, with the complicity and the active participation of Israel, which occupied the south of the country. “There is not a family that did not lose one of its members during the massacre,” explains Mohamed Afifi, whose aunt and several cousins ​​were murdered. They wanted to exterminate everyone. Like in Gaza today. »

The dream of young people

In this small piece of territory without horizon, young people hesitate between a feeling of anger and helplessness. “We know that everyone has left us in the middle of the road, but we continue to believe in God and in our fight. We will never abandon our land”, explains Bilal Hachem, 27 years old, father of a 2-year-old little girl (this is not the Bilal at the beginning of the text). Since October 7, he has been at all the demonstrations in the capital.

Lamar, a 16-year-old whose family is from Haifa, agrees: “It’s the only way for us to defend our ideas”, explains the one who studies accounting in Beirut and hopes to become a fashion designer.

Unlike all the camp residents met that day, she hopes that Hezbollah will not intervene in the south of the country and that the war will not move to a second front. “I just wish we could go back home, without a war being necessary. » An older man smiles, “She’s still young.” Only children think that we can return home without war. »