Nahr el-Bared Camp
مخيّم نهر البارد
Lebanon's second-largest Palestinian camp, founded in December 1949 for refugees from the Galilee, was destroyed in 2007 in four months of fighting between the Lebanese army and Fatah al-Islam. Nearly 6,000 homes and businesses were wrecked or badly damaged, and the camp has still not been fully rebuilt.
Nahr el-Bared — “cold river” — lies sixteen kilometres north of Tripoli beside the coastal highway, and takes its name from the river next to which it was built. Established by the League of Red Cross Societies in December 1949, it was the first Palestinian camp in Lebanon whose site was chosen in advance by the state and the aid agencies before refugees were moved into it. Those who arrived were a mixture: Palestinians pushed back from Syria after Damascus closed its borders in 1948, and others transferred from Anjar in the Bekaa and from Khan al-Askar in old Tripoli.
They came overwhelmingly from the Galilee — from Sa’sa’, Saffuriyya, al-Damun, al-Sammu’i, al-Ghabisiyya, al-Shaykh Dawud and Amqa — and named the camp’s quarters after those villages, as camps across the region did, so that the geography of a destroyed countryside survived in the address system of the exile. The land was over twenty plots belonging to more than sixty Lebanese owners, leased to UNRWA when the agency assumed responsibility for the camp in 1950. At first it was hundreds of tents of different sizes, some later pressed into service as classrooms; village notables handled the distribution of rations and tarpaulins, and the Lebanese gendarmerie handled security.
Concrete replaced canvas in the 1960s. By the 1970s the camp had run out of room and grew both upward and outward onto adjoining land that residents bought and registered — an extension that became known as the “new camp,” legally distinct from the UNRWA-run original.
In May 2007 fighting broke out between the Lebanese army and Fatah al-Islam, an armed group that had established itself in the extension. Over more than four months of shelling and street combat the old camp — 195,000 square metres and some 1,700 buildings of two to four storeys — was almost entirely destroyed, and the new camp, roughly 700,000 square metres, was heavily damaged. The Nahr el-Bared Reconstruction Commission put the number of homes and businesses completely destroyed or severely damaged at close to 6,000, and virtually the entire population was displaced, most of them to Beddawi camp nearby. Reconstruction began in 2009 and has proceeded in packages, slowed by chronic underfunding of UNRWA and by the security regime imposed on the rebuilt camp; more than seventeen years on, it is still not finished.
Sources
Cited works
2- palquest.org — nahr el bared refugee camp(opens in a new tab)https://www.palquest.org/en/highlight/38261/nahr-el-bared-refugee-camp
- palquest.org — palestinian refugees lebanon(opens in a new tab)https://www.palquest.org/en/highlight/6590/palestinian-refugees-lebanon