Ending life in a shed for Palestinians living in Lebanon gatherings

IRIN News
May 18, 2009
www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=84429

By Hugh Macleod
Kafr Bada

Ali Mohammed Hindawi’s earliest memories are of herding goats as a young boy on the slopes of Bassa, a village then in northern Palestine.
The last memories the 84-year-old will take with him to his grave are of three decades living alone in a rusted zinc shed in south Lebanon, without water, electricity or a toilet, sleeping among chickens, flies and litter, forever separated from his family by displacement and poverty.

“What do I think about at night? I think about my situation, that this is not a life for me,” said the frail old man, barely able to sit up after weathering another winter of freezing temperatures and downpours of rain that leak under his wooden crate bed. “It is the life of a dog. All I want is to spend my last few years in a good way.”

Hindawi is one of tens of thousands of Palestinian refugee in Lebanon who live in unofficial “gatherings”, collections of homes built without official permission and left largely unserviced, by either the Lebanese state, the Palestinian Authority (PA) or the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA.

Taken in by a family from Bassa and driven from their home by Israeli troops who over-ran northern Galilee in 1948, the young Hindawi crossed into Lebanon and settled in an UNRWA tent, set up in the Kafr Bada area of south Lebanon, near the Qasmiyeh river.

Many of these tents would grow into officially recognised refugee camps, with fixed boundaries and services provided by UNRWA. But for refugees like Hindawi, or Zahra Saeed and her family of 13 children living across the river in the Qasmiyeh gathering, no such certainties exist.

“There has been no real interest in the gatherings, only for the camps,” said Ghazi al Hassan, secretary of the Palestinian Popular Committee in Kafr Bada. “Now there’s a limit to the PA’s budget so they send very little here.”

Without a mandate to operate outside the 12 official refugee camps in Lebanon, home to around half the 400,000 Palestinians, UNRWA only makes food deliveries to Kafr Bada and other gatherings once every three months. With a budget of just $100 a month, al Hassan’s Popular Committee can do little more than collect rubbish and pay transport costs. NGOs such as the Lebanese Popular Aid for Relief and Development (PARD) try to fill the gap in the dozens of gatherings across the country.

Hindawi, like the partially blind 94-year-old Mariam Dyabissa, a Palestinian refugee who shares her rusted zinc shack in Qasmiyeh with her mentally ill son, relies on kindly neighbours to bring him food, wash and dress him and light the fire at night.

The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) is now conducting the first comprehensive, household survey of Palestinian gatherings in Lebanon, which include areas adjacent to UNRWA camps. In the northern Nahr al-Bared camp, largely destroyed in fighting two years ago, reconstruction in the adjacent areas has been hampered by the absence of a clear mandate for any one agency to lead efforts inside Palestinian gatherings. (Link)

“Nahr al-Bared highlighted the issue. Lots of people think the Palestinians live in camps. They don’t know there are tens of thousands living in gatherings in very mixed circumstances,” said Richard Evans, NRC Lebanon programme manager for shelter and rehabilitation in the Palestinian gatherings. “We feel there is a humanitarian need. These people are not getting adequate services.”

In 2005, the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) made a needs assessment of 39 gatherings, defined as having a minimum of 25 households, finding that the right to work and to own property was the refugees’ main need. In the Qasmiyeh gathering Zahra Saeed said she had received an eviction notice from the local court every six months for the last ten years, Palestinians being banned from owning property in Lebanon.

“After ten years even the gypsies have got official status,” she said, pointing across to the row of make-shift shelters where some families originally from Tyre now live. “Now even they are threatening to evict us.”

NRC Lebanon, whose report is due out in June, is hoping to secure between $2 and $3m which they said would allow them to upgrade the homes of around 250 families living in gatherings in south Lebanon.

For Ali Hindawi that could mean spending his last days with at least a concrete wall to keep the draught out and a door to close at night. But that may be little comfort for a life of such hardship.

“If I feel happy or sad it doesn’t matter,” he said. No one cares about me.”