One thread, every collection
The Camps
Refugee camps as cities — Aida, Jabalia, Balata, Yarmouk, and the memory of return.
40 entries across 12 collections
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.
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.
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.
Bayt Darras
Gaza · 1948
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 · 1948
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.
Saffuriyya
Nazareth · 1948
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.
Qalandiya
Jerusalem Governorate, West Bank
One name, four things: a village of about a thousand people, a refugee camp of 16,344 registered refugees, an airport that was Jerusalem's and is now a military camp, and the busiest checkpoint in the West Bank. Ninety-eight per cent of the village's land is Area C; the wall isolates 59 per cent of it.
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.
Sheikh Jarrah
Occupied East Jerusalem
Two kilometres north of the Old City, on the road that becomes the road to Ramallah: the quarter of Jerusalem's Muslim notables, and the place where refugee families rehoused by Jordan and UNRWA in 1956 have been evicted a second time — under an Israeli law that lets Jews reclaim pre-1948 property in East Jerusalem while denying Palestinians the equivalent right inside Israel.
Shu'fat
Jerusalem Governorate, occupied East Jerusalem
A village on the ridge north of Jerusalem, on the Ramallah road, swept inside the municipal boundary Israel declared in 1967 — and then cut in half by the wall. Shu'fat holds the only refugee camp inside that boundary: 16,419 registered refugees on 0.203 square kilometres, holding Jerusalem residency, paying Jerusalem taxes, and crossing a checkpoint to reach the city they legally live in.
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
Bir al-Saba (Beersheba)
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.
Mohammed Abdul Jabbar Abu Seif
Julis
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 village near Beer al-Sabe, Naqab
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
Jusayr, Gaza district
Eight years old when her family was expelled from Jusayr in 1948; she has lived in Jabaliya refugee camp ever since.
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
Grandfather whose farewell to his slain granddaughter became a symbol of Gaza's grief
Khaled Nabhan, 54, known worldwide as the grandfather who cradled his granddaughter Reem Ali Khalil Badwan and called her 'the soul of my soul,' was himself killed in an Israeli strike on Nuseirat refugee camp on 16 December 2024.
Fathi Shaqaqi
Physician and founder of the Islamic Jihad Movement, assassinated in Malta in 1995 · 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.
Juliano Mer-Khamis
Actor and founder of the Freedom Theatre in Jenin · 1958–2011
Actor and director who founded the Freedom Theatre in Jenin refugee camp and was assassinated outside it in 2011.
Mornings in Jenin
Susan Abulhawa · 2006
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 Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries
Rosemary Sayigh · 1979
A people's history of the Nakba and the camps built out of the testimony of the people who lived it — the book that put Palestinian refugees in Lebanon on the record in their own words.
Four Hours in Shatila
Jean Genet
Genet's eyewitness account of the aftermath of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre — four hours among the dead, written without flinching.
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.
Lajee Center
Culture from Aida Camp · Aida Refugee Camp, Bethlehem
A community cultural center in Aida Refugee Camp running a music institute, library, kindergarten, and arts programmes for a new generation.
Listed onMakers — this collection has no page per entry.
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.
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.
The UNRWA Photo and Film Archive
United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East · photographic
More than 430,000 negatives, 10,000 prints, 85,000 slides, 75 films and 730 videocassettes recording Palestine refugee life from 1948 onward — inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register in 2009.
Zochrot
Zochrot Organization, Haifa · oral-history
An Israeli organisation that documents the Nakba in Hebrew for a Hebrew-reading public: an interactive Nakba map of destroyed localities, a testimonies archive, a refugee camp map, a historical map archive, and the iReturn app.
Where this thread crosses others
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