Balata Camp
مخيّم بلاطة
Laid out in 1950 on rented farmland east of Nablus for 4,484 refugees, Balata became the most crowded refugee camp in the West Bank — a quarter square kilometre holding the descendants of some 111 destroyed towns and villages, and the place where organised refugee-rights politics in the West Bank began.
Balata Camp was set up by UNRWA in 1950 on twenty-five hectares of agricultural plain east of Nablus, land the Jordanian government rented from the neighbouring village of Balata. It opened with 4,484 refugees living in large tents, one tent to an extended family. The plain had a well, which meant some of the newcomers could go on doing what they had done in Palestine — farm — either for wages or by renting the surrounding fields.
The people who arrived came from roughly 111 towns, villages and communities inside what had become Israel. About sixty percent came from a handful of places on the coastal plain: Jaffa and its satellite villages — Salama, al-Shaykh Muwannis, al-Abbasiyya, Arab Abu Kishk, al-Jammasin — together with Lydda, al-Tira, Kafr Saba and Bayt Dajan. Roughly forty-three percent of all refugees registered from the Jaffa area ended up in this one camp. The neighbourhoods that formed, the harat, were organised by village and family, so that the map of the lost coast was reproduced in the alleys of Nablus.
The tents gave way to houses between 1954 and 1956: near-identical two-room units with a kitchen and a bathroom, built for a single nuclear family, along unpaved lanes that turned to mud in winter. When the ground ran out the camp grew upward — first with UNRWA permits limiting building to two storeys, later, after the Palestinian Authority arrived, without regulation at all, producing dark, badly ventilated blocks pressed against one another. Water, sewage and electricity come through the Nablus municipality and have never kept pace.
Balata holds the largest concentration of registered refugees in the West Bank: UNRWA counts 23,600 registered there, while the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics put the resident population at 15,663 in 2021. Poverty and unemployment run far above West Bank averages — the camps’ poverty rate was measured at 38.1 percent against 24.4 percent in cities — and the four UNRWA schools, with more than 4,500 pupils, run two shifts a day. The camp is known above all for its politics: the first organisation in the West Bank founded specifically to defend refugee rights was established in Balata in 1994, and the camp has remained a centre of the argument that the right of return is not negotiable.
Sources
Cited works
2- palquest.org — balata refugee camp(opens in a new tab)https://www.palquest.org/en/highlight/30660/balata-refugee-camp
- en.wikipedia.org — Balata Camp(opens in a new tab)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balata_Camp