The Camps

Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association

Addameer

Addameer supports Palestinian political prisoners held by Israeli authorities and campaigns against administrative detention and torture.

Amnesty International — Israel and Occupied Palestinian Territories

Amnesty International

Amnesty documents human rights violations by Israeli authorities and Palestinian armed groups and campaigns for justice, accountability, and an end to apartheid.

UNRWA — UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees

UNRWA

Established by UN General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV) in December 1949, UNRWA provides education, health care, and relief to millions of registered Palestine refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza.

US Campaign for Palestinian Rights — national advocacy network

US Campaign for Palestinian Rights

Founded in 2001 as the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, USCPR is a national network providing resources and strategic support to the U.S.-based Palestine solidarity movement, with a focus on ending U.S. military funding to Israel.

Malcolm X in Gaza and "Zionist Logic"

Malcolm X

Days after walking through the refugee camps of Gaza, Malcolm X set down his analysis of Zionism as a new form of colonialism.

Fathi Shaqaqi

1951–1995

The physician from Rafah refugee camp, son of a family expelled from Zarnuqa, who founded the Islamic Jihad Movement and was shot dead by Mossad agents on the island of Malta on 26 October 1995.

Haidar Abdel Shafi

1919–2007

Gaza physician who founded the Red Crescent Society in Gaza and headed the Palestinian delegation to the 1991 Madrid peace conference.

Juliano Mer-Khamis

1958–2011

Actor and director who founded the Freedom Theatre in Jenin refugee camp and was assassinated outside it in 2011.

Mustafa Barghouti

1954–

The Moscow-trained physician who built the Palestinian Medical Relief Society into a health service reaching over a million patients a year, co-founded the Palestinian National Initiative with Edward Said and Haidar Abdel Shafi, and came second to Abbas in the 2005 presidential election.

Omar Barghouti

Co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement

The human rights defender who co-founded the BDS movement in 2005 after a year of consultations across Palestinian society, and has lived under an Israeli travel ban and judicial harassment for leading its nonviolent campaign ever since.

Rosemary Sayigh

1927–

For half a century she recorded Palestinian refugees in Lebanon's camps in their own words, arguing that a people's history had to be built from below or it would not be built at all.

Gate of the Sun

Elias Khoury

In a Beirut hospital, stories are told to a comatose fighter — an epic retelling of the Palestinian exodus from Galilee to the camps.

Mornings in Jenin

Susan Abulhawa

A multi-generational family saga from a village near Acre to the Jenin refugee camp — the novel that brought the Palestinian story to millions of readers worldwide.

The Battle of Karameh

1968

Palestinian fedayeen and the Jordanian army fight a full Israeli armored incursion at the Karameh refugee camp. The costly stand transforms Fatah into a mass movement almost overnight.

The Battle of Jenin

2002

The fiercest battle of Operation Defensive Shield leaves the heart of Jenin refugee camp in ruins — and a bitter dispute over the death toll.

Munich and the Wrath of God

1972–1973

Black September seizes the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics; eleven Israelis, five attackers and a German policeman die. Israel answers with a years-long assassination campaign across Europe and the Middle East.

Sabra and Shatila Massacre

1982

During Israel's occupation of West Beirut, a Lebanese Phalangist militia massacres Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps over three days.

From Acre Prison

Traditional — sung by Firqat al-ʿAshiqin

The funeral song for Fuad Hijazi, Muhammad Jamjoum and Atta al-Zir, hanged by the British at Acre prison on 17 June 1930. It went out with their funerals and never stopped being sung — in the camps, at commemorations, and inside the prisons.

Palestine Refugee

society

A Palestine refugee, in UNRWA's working definition, is a person whose normal place of residence was Palestine between 1 June 1946 and 15 May 1948 and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 war. Descendants are also eligible for registration; today some 5.9 million Palestine refugees are registered with the agency.

Other Registered Persons (UNRWA)

legal

The second of UNRWA's two registration categories: people the agency serves who do not meet all of its Palestine Refugee criteria and are therefore not counted in the official registered refugee figure — a bookkeeping line that is routinely misread as a statement about who is or is not a refugee.

Al-Lajjun

Jenin

Al-Lajjun stood beside Tell al-Mutasallim — ancient Megiddo — at the southwestern edge of Marj Ibn Amir, on the site of the Roman camp of the Sixth Legion. Repopulated in the late nineteenth century by families from Umm al-Fahm, it counted 1,103 people in 1944/45 and was taken by the Golani Brigade at dawn on 30 May 1948. Kibbutz Megiddo was built on its lands from 1949; most of its people returned to Umm al-Fahm.

Al-Sarafand

Ramla

Al-Sarafand — Sarafand al-Kharab — was a citrus village beside the great British camp on the Ramla plain, burned by British forces in the late 1920s and rebuilt, only to be emptied in April 1948 as fighting closed in. Nes Ziona has spread over its lands, but many houses and the village school remain.

Bayt Darras

Gaza

Bayt Darras was a farming town northeast of Gaza, defended by Sudanese troops and local militiamen until the Givati Brigade overran it in May 1948. Its people fled south into the Gaza Strip, where their descendants live in refugee camps to this day.

Bayt Jibrin

Hebron

Bayt Jibrin, the Roman city of Eleutheropolis, dominated the crossroads of the southern hills until October 1948, when it was captured during Operation Yoav. Its people fled to the Hebron hills and refugee camps such as al-Fawwar and Aida; kibbutz Beit Guvrin rose on its lands.

Bayt Nabala

Ramla

Bayt Nabala looked out over the plain around Lydda from a rocky hill east of the airport, 2,310 people holding 15,051 dunums in 1944/45. On 13 July 1948 Israeli soldiers drove much of the expelled population of Lydda towards it while it was still in Arab hands; the village fell within days, during Operation Dani, and was demolished on 13 September 1948. Its people scattered to Ramallah, Deir Ammar, Rantis and the Jalazone camp.

Julis

Gaza

Julis, set on a wadi bank beside a road junction and a British military camp on the Gaza coast highway, fell to the Giv'ati Brigade around the first truce of 1948 and then held against the Egyptian counterattack in which Gamal Abdel Nasser served as staff officer. A few cement houses remain beside the old camp.

Lifta

Jerusalem

Lifta, at the western gateway to Jerusalem, was emptied of its roughly 3,000 residents in the first months of 1948. Its stone houses still stand in the valley below the highway, making it the most visibly surviving depopulated Palestinian village and a focus of return and preservation campaigns.

Qastina

Gaza

Qastina stood on the highway between al-Majdal and the Jerusalem–Jaffa road, its 890 people farming grain and citrus beside the British camp at Beer Tuvia. The Giv'ati Brigade seized it days after the first truce ended, in July 1948; Kiryat Malakhi and several settlements later rose on its lands.

Saffuriyya

Nazareth

Saffuriyya was the largest village of the Nazareth district — a place layered over ancient Sepphoris — until it was bombed and occupied in July 1948. Its people scattered to Nazareth and to refugee camps in Lebanon; the moshav of Zippori and an archaeological park now occupy its lands.

Balata Camp

Nablus, West Bank

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.

Deir al-Balah

Gaza Strip

Deir al-Balah — the 'Monastery of Dates' — grew around a fourth-century monastery on the ancient coast road, hid a Bronze Age cemetery beneath its soil, and after 1948 became town and refugee camp together in the narrow heart of the Gaza Strip.

Dheisheh Camp

Bethlehem, West Bank

Established in 1949 on a third of a square kilometre south of Bethlehem, Dheisheh gathered the survivors of as many as 79 villages from six subdistricts — Hebron, Jerusalem, Ramla, Gaza, Bir al-Sabi' and Jaffa; Zakariyya, Bayt Nattif, Ras Abu Ammar, al-Walaja and al-Qabu among them — into one of the most politically formidable camps in Palestine.

Jabalia

Gaza Strip

Jabalia, the market town on the rise northeast of Gaza City, became after 1948 the site of the largest refugee camp in the Strip; the first intifada began in its alleys in December 1987, and the war since 2023 has returned to it again and again.

Jenin

Northern West Bank

Jenin guarded the pass to the Jezreel plain for millennia, defied the British in the 1936 revolt, and held off Israel in June 1948; its refugee camp, born of the Nakba, fought the army for ten days in April 2002. The raids still come. The memory holds.

Jerash Camp (Gaza Camp)

Jerash, Jordan

Built in March 1968 for 11,500 Palestinians driven out of Gaza in the June war, Jerash camp is known in Jordan simply as the Gaza Camp. Nearly nine in ten of its residents come from the Gaza Strip — and unlike other Palestinians in Jordan, they hold no citizenship, which has made it the poorest camp in the kingdom.

Jericho

Jordan Valley, West Bank

Jericho — Ariha, the city of palms, some 250 metres below the sea — has lived beside its spring for roughly ten thousand years, longer perhaps than any city on earth. In living memory its valley twice filled with refugees; the camps of 1948, Aqabat Jabr and Ein as-Sultan, are still there.

Khan Younis

Gaza Strip

Khan Younis began in 1387 as a Mamluk caravanserai on the Egypt road and grew into the Gaza district's second town; 1948 made its refugee camp one of the Strip's largest, November 1956 left it a massacre to mourn, and the war since 2023 has left much of the city in ruins.

Nablus

Nablus Governorate, northern West Bank

Nablus — Roman Flavia Neapolis, nestled between Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal — is the northern West Bank's proud commercial heart, famed for its Old City, its olive-oil soap and its knafeh, and shadowed by Balata, the West Bank's most populous refugee camp.

Nahr el-Bared Camp

North Lebanon

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.

Shatila Camp

Beirut, Lebanon

A tent pitched on Beirut's outskirts by one man from Majd al-Kroum in 1949 became the camp whose name the world learned in September 1982. Shatila is the densest Palestinian camp in Lebanon: barely 70,000 square metres, destroyed twice, rebuilt vertically, and now shared with Syrians, Lebanese and migrant workers.

Tulkarm

West Bank

Tulkarm — the 'Mount of the Vineyard' — was the market town where the Samarian hills meet the coastal plain, until the 1949 armistice line took most of its fields; its refugee camp is among the largest in the West Bank, and its streets have known every army of the last century.

Yarmouk Camp

Damascus, Syria

Eight kilometres south of Damascus, Yarmouk was the capital of the Palestinian diaspora in Syria — its streets named for Haifa, Safad, Lubya and Jerusalem, home before 2011 to some 160,000 Palestinian refugees. The Syrian war emptied it — Al Jazeera counts some 160,000 forced to flee over its course — and those who stayed endured siege and starvation.

Abdel Mahdi al-Wuheidi

Driven from Bir al-Saba as a child in 1948 and from Jabalia camp in 2023, he returned after the October 2025 ceasefire to a house standing in rubble.

Abdullah Nashwan

Eleven years old when his family fled the massacre at al-Dawayima in October 1948; displaced again in 1967, he has lived in Jordan's Baqa'a camp since.

Mohammed Abdul Jabbar Abu Seif

A 91-year-old survivor from Julis, in the Gaza district, recalls his family's expulsion in 1948 and a lifetime in the refugee camps of Bureij and Nuseirat.

Ouda Salem Ouda Abu Haddaf

A Bedouin survivor from the Naqab, born in 1936, describes the 1948 attack on his village and the chain of displacements that ended in the refugee camps of Gaza.

Umm Omar

Eight years old when her family was expelled from Jusayr in 1948; she has lived in Jabaliya refugee camp ever since.

Wajiha al-Harsh

An 80-year-old refugee from Jaffa, living in the Jabaliya camp's 'Jaffa neighborhood' in Gaza, recalls the panic of the May 1948 flight from her city.

Inaash Association

embroidery

Founded in 1969, Inaash produces traditional Palestinian hand embroidery with refugee women in Lebanon's camps — 350+ women working today, 9,000+ supported since inception.

Lajee Center

arts

A community cultural center in Aida Refugee Camp running a music institute, library, kindergarten, and arts programmes for a new generation.

Fadi al-Wahidi

Al Jazeera cameraman

Fadi al-Wahidi was shot in the neck by Israeli fire while filming near Jabalia refugee camp, leaving him paralyzed; Israel blocked his medical evacuation for 122 days despite appeals from UN experts, before he was finally evacuated to Egypt on February 8, 2025.

Khaled Nabhan

c. 1970–2024

Khaled Nabhan, 54, known worldwide as the grandfather who cradled his granddaughter Reem's body and called her 'the soul of my soul,' was himself killed in an Israeli strike on Nuseirat refugee camp, according to Anadolu, Haaretz and Palestinian media.