Shatila Camp

Shatila began in 1949 with a single purchase. Abed Bisher, from the Upper Galilee village of Majd al-Kroum, had reached Beirut in 1948 with about twenty members of his family, rented a one-room apartment, and within months could no longer pay for it. He bought a large tent, pitched it in the Horsh area on the city’s edge, and began gathering his fellow villagers around it. A Beiruti notable, Saad al-Din Pacha Shatila, who held power of attorney over a nearby plot whose owner was in Brazil, let them settle there. The Red Cross recognised the gathering as a camp in 1950; UNRWA took it over the following year and named it after the notable.

Its first residents numbered about a hundred; within a few years UNRWA counted more than two thousand. Most came from Majd al-Kroum, the rest from some twenty-five other Galilee villages — al-Birwa, Dayr al-Qasi, Shaab, Saffuriyya, Amqa, al-Kabri, Balad al-Shaykh, Kuwaykat, Safsaf, al-Manshiyya — with around twenty-five families from Jaffa. Because the camp was small and its origins so mixed, it never divided cleanly by village as other Lebanese camps did; the sharper line residents remember was between fallahi and madani, country and town.

Lebanese authorities forbade reinforcing the tents in case the camp became permanent; the refugees reinforced them from the inside with boards, stones, sand and the wooden cheese boxes UNRWA distributed, until an agreement in 1955 allowed them to build outward. Breeze-block walls and corrugated zinco roofs replaced canvas in the early 1960s. When the PLO took over the camps in the 1970s, Shatila and the streets around it — Sabra market, the Gaza hospital, the Samed workshops — became the administrative heart of the Palestinian revolution in Lebanon, and the population of the camp and its surroundings rose from around twenty thousand to close to fifty.

Then came the massacre. Between 6 p.m. on Thursday 16 September and 1 p.m. on Saturday 18 September 1982, forty-three hours in all, Lebanese militiamen allowed into the camps by the Israeli army that had encircled them killed the residents of Sabra and Shatila; estimates of the dead vary widely, but are almost certainly no lower than 3,500. The Battle of the Camps that followed between 1985 and 1988 left Shatila almost entirely destroyed and its people displaced. Rebuilt vertically after the war, the camp today covers roughly 70,000 square metres and 452 buildings. A 2017 survey by the Lebanese Palestinian Dialogue Committee counted about 14,010 residents, of whom only a third are Palestinian — 57.6 percent are Syrians who fled the war after 2011, 8.2 percent Lebanese. Palestinians in Lebanon remain barred from many professions; the camp’s economy is grocery shops, day labour and remittance.

Sources

• Shatila Refugee Camp — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Sabra and Shatila, 16–18 September 1982 — PalQuest