'Who will protect us?': Why Palestinians reject Lebanon's push to disarm refugee camps

During his first visit to Lebanon in eight years, the 89-year-old, widely unpopular Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas had one major objective: the disarmament of the country’s crowded and poverty-stricken Palestinian refugee camps.

A month later, it appears as though this goal, which observers dubbed unlikely due to the lack of a practical implementation plan, is on the back burner once again, but not off the table.

Sources told The New Arab in mid-June that President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam are adamant that the postponement will not become indefinite and that they see the camps’ disarmament as a critical national objective.

The right - or not - for Palestinians to bear arms in Lebanon is a decades-old point of contention, with discussions around Lebanon’s intentions toward a state monopoly on weapons after the Israel-Hezbollah war preceding Abbas’ three-day visit in mid-May.

At the centre of the issue is a weakened Hezbollah, with a November 2024 ceasefire deal with Israel mandating the removal of the party’s military presence from south of the Litani River.

Aoun’s election by Lebanon’s parliament and his subsequent appointment of former ICJ head judge Salam as prime minister have also changed the country’s power balance.

Aoun, who committed himself to the state’s monopoly on arms in his inaugural address, is leading the discussions with Hezbollah under intense international pressure - expressed via conditioned financial aid - as well as a fragile political landscape domestically.

Responding to this new dynamic, Hamas’ Lebanon movement released a statement in April saying it would be willing to enter a dialogue with Lebanese authorities toward its disarmament, so long as the discussion also included Palestinian rights.

The deal Abbas eventually made seemingly failed to meet these demands. Lebanese officials who spoke to The New Arab last week said the official delay of disarmament is the result of internal disputes within the various Palestinian factions, present across the country’s 12 (officially recognised) camps.

However, sources from rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah (which is the dominant group within Abbas’ Palestinian Authority) made it clear to The New Arab that the Palestinian refugee community is more concerned about the Lebanese government pursuing disarmament with no reassurances on security and social welfare.

“The safety of the camps, coordination with UNRWA, and the right of return must all be addressed first before they open the issue of disarmament,” a source from within Hamas told The New Arab. “These should be raised in a humanitarian, not a security, framework.”

It’s a mistake, the source argues, to equate Palestinian disarmament with Hezbollah’s disarmament, considering the difference in status between the two demographics within Lebanon.

And the sudden resurfacing of the issue, especially in the current context of the ongoing Israeli onslaught against Palestinians in Gaza, has left representatives sceptical of the government’s motives.

Palestinian refugees in Lebanon - of which UNRWA reports there are about 222,000 - do not have the right to own land and are banned from working in more than 30 high-paying professions, including as doctors, pharmacists, engineers, lawyers, and even as taxi drivers or tour guides.

Opponents to Palestinian labour rights claim that allowing refugees into these sectors would hinder their return to the homeland. However, now, more than 77 years after the Nakba, Palestinians in Lebanon are still in limbo.

“They didn’t give us our full rights as Palestinians and they didn’t secure our right to return to our homes in Palestine,” says Mahmoud Abu-Loz, a member of the Fatah Youth Council in the Shatila refugee camp, located in the southern suburbs of Beirut.

As of March 2023, before the country was plunged into instability amid Israel’s war on Gaza and with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon (and eventually further north, including Beirut), UNRWA reported that 80 percent of all Palestinian refugees in Lebanon were living below the poverty line.

With the economic fallout from the fighting, as well as Israel’s long-running campaign to dismantle UNRWA that resulted in the withdrawal of international funding, heavily relied-upon support for Palestinian refugees was put on the line.

“In a way, Palestinians in Lebanon are neither refugees nor citizens,” says Sari Hanafi, sociology professor and director of the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies at AUB. “They have been in Lebanon now for generations and they have almost no legal status.”

A Lebanese policeman could walk into a refugee camp and find nearly every Palestinian there guilty of some crime in the eyes of the government, Hanafi explains. “Everything, even running a barber shop, is illegal.”

Hanafi sees the weapons in question, most of which are small arms or light weapons, as having “never served a good cause,” used mostly in infighting and during family feuds. Still, he says that disarmament as a “solo objective,” without any meaningful engagement on the issue of Palestinians’ quality of life in Lebanon, is “just silly”.

The source from Hamas says he sees the government’s thus-far ineffective attempt at disarmament as symbolic of tangled dynamics.

“It’s being proposed incorrectly. And, as we’ve seen, time has passed with no serious implementation of disarmament. That’s proof of how difficult the issue is,” he says.

“Many parts of the Lebanese state don’t want to be involved because it affects the internal Lebanese balance,” the source added. “They don’t want to reopen the wounds of the camps."

These wounds run deep and bloody. Many Palestinians evoke memories of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres carried out by Christian militias during the civil war.

Israeli-backed militants descended on the southern Beirut neighbourhood of Sabra and the adjacent Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in the days after the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) had withdrawn from Lebanon.

PLO leader Yasser Arafat had requested that the American-led multinational force protect the unarmed and vulnerable Palestinians who were left behind amid a still-raging war, unable to defend themselves.

But his call was not heeded, and thousands of Palestinians were slaughtered in a harrowing three days that shocked the world.

“They want to disarm us, but what about the last time Palestinians were disarmed?” Abu-Loz told The New Arab. “Our weapons are our last means of protection. If we lose them, how do we protect ourselves from those who don’t like Palestinians in Lebanon?”

“Who will protect us? The Lebanese Army? It isn’t even able to protect its own civilians in Lebanon,” he says, referring to the nearly 200 people who have been killed by Israeli strikes since the ceasefire began and the army expanded its jurisdiction in the south.

Ghadir Hamadi is a journalist and founder of Sawab, a youth-led fact-checking initiative combating fake news and hate speech in Lebanon. She currently works at L’Orient Today in Beirut.

Follow her on X: @ghadirhamadi 

Amelia Hankins is a journalist, editor, and fiction writer based in Beirut whose recent work has been published in L’Orient Today and the Markaz Review. She is currently working on a project tracing her family’s experience during the Great Famine of Mount Lebanon