10.18 AM Friday, 29 March 2024
  • City Fajr Shuruq Duhr Asr Magrib Isha
  • Dubai 04:56 06:10 12:26 15:53 18:37 19:52
29 March 2024

From tents…to mud houses…to villas

All pictures by Nadim Kawach

Published
By Nadim Kawach

Mahmoud Hussein wiped sweat off his forehead as he tried to help a builder he had hired to expand his house for the swelling family. Hussein was building a second floor on top of his house in a refugee camp in Lebanon as he braced for his son’s marriage.

“I have six children and most of them have married…some of them and their children live with me while my elder son will soon marry…the house no longer can accommodate all of them so I have no choice but to expand it,” he said.

“Look at what I have now…it’s a big villa which I have built over the years with the help of my life savings and the United Nations…I was told by my father that when he came here, he and the other refugees dwelt in tents for many years before they built mud houses…now most of the refugees live in villas.”



But like many other Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Hussein, 54, still keeps the key of his family’s home in Palestine. The large key has eroded and rusted but the Palestinians view the piece of metal as a symbol of their return to their homeland.

“I still keep the key, which my father gave me before he died…I will keep it forever and will give it to my children who will give it to their grandchildren…it is a symbol and an evidence that we have a homeland of which we were deprived,” Hussein said.

Hussein is among more than 450,000 Palestinian refugees who live in Lebanon after they were driven out of Palestine in 1948.



Thousands of them had fled barefooted and crossed the border into Lebanon, where they were given tents, food and other relief aid by the government and the UN.

The refugees had been told they would return home a few weeks after they escaped massacres but their ordeal worsened and they were then moved to makeshift camps.

A few years later, many of them started to replace the tents with mud houses as their stay in Lebanon appeared drag on. In mid 1970s, they began replacing those cottages with concrete houses when their financial conditions began to improve after a large number of them travelled to the oil-rich Gulf for work.

“All Palestinians here now have big houses and many of them are planning to go higher,” said Hussein, a resident of the hilltop Mieh-Mieh refugee camp in south Lebanon. “But that does not mean we are staying here forever….we want to have a decent life here but we all are convinced that we must return to Palestine.”



When Hussein’s father came to Mieh-Mieh, he had a family of 13 crammed in one tent before it was replaced by a two-room mud house.

A few years later, he built a concrete house comprising three small rooms before some of his children grew up and moved to other houses with their wives and children.

Nearly 66 years since they moved into Mieh-Mieh, the number of refugees has soared to more than 7,000 from less than 2,000 although the camp is just around two sq km.

The land has been leased by the UN to house the Palestinians pending a political settlement between them and Israel.

Electricity and water services are provided free to the refugee camps as they are donated by Saudi billionaire Prince Al Waleed bin Talal and charity organizations.

But in the absence of jobs and real income sources, their living standards have deteriorated over the years despite regular UN relief aid.



According to bank sources, Palestinians working in the Gulf remit more than $400 million a year to their families in Lebanon but such funds have failed to improve the living standards amidst increasing population and spiraling cost of living in that country.

“We are suffering almost every day…we struggle to get food for our families and this seems to be an endless tragedy,” said Imad Khattam, a 55-year-old Palestinian in the nearby Ain Al Helweh camp of more than 150,000 refugees.

“But the good thing is that we now have our own houses or you can call them decent shelters…they are shelters because we not want to be settled in Lebanon…expanding our houses for the new generations does not mean that we want to stay here….”

Khattab went into his bed room and returned with a massive 20-cm rusting key. He clutched it firmly, lifted it high and looked proudly at the piece of metal.

“Can you see this,” he said, as he waved the key before his eyes. “This was given to me by my father…I remember he told me that this is the dearest item to him and warned me against losing it…it is the key of our house in Palestine…he said that losing it is as if losing not only our house but the whole Palestine.”