Ain al-Hilweh is the largest, most heavily armed and most violent Palestine refugee camp in Lebanon. Home to around 75,000 Palestinian refugees and their descendants, Ain al-Hilweh, or Beautiful Eyes, was built on the site of a former British World War II army base just outside the southern port city of Sidon [Credit: Hugh Macleod]
Published On 2 Oct 20102 Oct 2010
On Sharia Bustan Yahoudi - Jewish Park Street, named after the Jews who used to live around Sidon - the irony of their address is only one among a litany of indignities suffered by the refugees. Unable to gain citizenship, they live in limbo. The government has passed a law allowing them to claim free work permits for employment in the private sector, but they remain barred from over 70 professional jobs [Credit: Hugh Macleod]
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Ain al-Hilweh today is a two square kilometre pressure cooker of tedium and despair, punctuated by moments of terror. The Fatah faction has long held sway in the camp, including manning the security checkpoints around it, but is being challenged by the rising power of Islamic groups [Credit: Hugh Macleod]
Fatah gunmen man checkpoints at the entrance to Ain al-Hilweh, but large swaths of the camp are now under the control of Islamist groups who rival Fatah for leadership of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon [Credit: Hugh Macleod]
Though the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), of which Fatah is the dominant faction, has long held sway over most of the 12 Palestinian camps in Lebanon its relative weakness in Nahr al-Bared allowed Fatah al-Islam to gain a foothold. During its 29 year occupation of Lebanon, which ended in 2005, the Syrian army had sought to weaken the PLO because of its involvement in the Lebanese civil war [Credit: Hugh Macleod]
Sheikh Abu Sharif says his Islamist group Ozbat Ansar is the largest faction in Ain al-Hilweh. The Sunni group has been involved in a number of firefights with its secular rival Fatah [Credit: Hugh Macleod]
For most Palestinians, the right to return home of the up to six million refugees who can trace origins back to the exodus from Palestine that followed the creation of Israel in 1948, is an absolute [Credit: Hugh Macleod]
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"I was born here in a small tent in 1958," says Abu Ahmad Fadel Taha, the leader of Hamas in Ain al-Hilweh. "I have lived all my life here with my father, who is now 94, and my eight children. We live with hardship every day and we live the dream of return every day" [Credit: Hugh Macleod]
"No-one can negotiate on our right to return to Palestine. There is only one country called Palestine and we will never return there except by resistance to Israel," says Abu Yousef, a fighter with the Palestinian faction Ansar Allah, as a group of about 100 protesters wave flags and guns behind him [Credit: Hugh Macleod]
At a protest in Ain al-Hilweh demanding the right of Palestinian refugees to return, a boy holds up the key to the home of his family in Palestine and the identification paper his grandfather was given when he fled to Lebanon seven years after the creation of Israel [Credit: Hugh Macleod]
