Tal al-Za‘atar Refugee Camp

The Tal al-Za‘atar refugee camp was located near the village of al-Dekwaneh, about six kilometers east of downtown Beirut. In 1975, the camp’s geographical location—alongside other factors in internal Lebanese politics intertwined with regional politics—placed it at the epicenter of events in the Lebanese Civil War. At the beginning of 1976, the camp was subjected to a supply blockade, followed by a military assault carried out by right-wing Christian militias. This culminated in a massacre in which hundreds of its residents were killed, the camp was eradicated, and survivors were displaced.

Establishment of the Camp

Tal al-Za‘atar Camp was established in 1949 by the League of Red Cross Societies on a plot of privately owned land that had been used as a British Army base during World War II. The camp’s name (“thyme hill”) was taken from its location in an uninhabited area where wild za‘atar (thyme) grew abundantly. While the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) officially named the camp Dekwaneh Camp for its proximity to the nearby village of Dekwaneh, identity documents issued by the Lebanese state used the label “Tal al-Za‘atar” to denote the place of residence or birth for the refugees living in the camp.

At the time of its establishment, Tal al-Za‘atar had an area of 56,645 square meters and housed 1,932 Palestinian refugees who had been displaced by Zionist militias from villages in northern Palestine in 1948, the year of the Nakba, or catastrophe. At its inception, the camp consisted of makeshift tents pitched by the Red Cross and the old military dormitories left over from the British encampment. Dwellings were allocated to residents so that those belonging to the same clan or originating from the same village were housed together. In addition to the Bedouin communities of Arab al-Raml and Arab al-Iraqiyya (the Aal Iraqi clan) who came from the vicinity of Haifa, the camp also had neighborhoods for the Arab al-Tawqayn Bedouins and the ghawarneh (those residents of towns and villages in the ghawr, or low-lying region) of the Houla Valley, such as al-Khalisa. There were also neighborhoods for those from Palestinian villages in the vicinity of Haifa, Akka, and Safad, such as Alma, Hunin, and Lazzaza. The formation of the camp in this way, based upon the twin constituents of the Palestinian village and hamula, or extended clan, contributed to the lasting social cohesion of these small communities.

Infrastructure

In 1952, the newly founded UNRWA took over responsibility for services in the camp and replaced the tents with four sets of asbestos-roofed prefabricated structures colloquially known as baraksat (“barracks”) across the camp. There were fourteen baraksat in all, each containing two large rooms and two small ones. Rooms were allocated to families according to their size, which was determined by the number of family members registered with UNRWA. These dwellings lacked indoor toilets, and thus residents were obliged to use public toilets built for them by UNRWA, which were spread across the camp’s neighborhoods.

UNRWA built a central water storage tank, as well as two points of distribution to serve the needs of the residents of the northern section of the camp for water. It also took responsibility for covering part of the gutter that drained sewage and rainwater from north to south and ran right through the middle of the camp. However, UNRWA’s overall involvement in developing the infrastructure of Tal al-Za‘atar remained limited, so the problem of open sewers that overflowed in the winter and attracted mosquitoes and bugs in the summer (all the while emitting foul odors) remained unresolved. The camp just had one main thoroughfare approximately 200 meters long; it was narrow and only partially paved, starting from the entrance to the camp (where the Ayouti café was located) and ending at the Bisan School. Two side streets branched off from it. Four other streets ran through the vicinity of the camp and connected it to the Lebanese neighborhoods. Testimonies from surviving residents of the now-bygone camp tell us that the Lebanese state connected the homes in Tal al-Za‘atar to the electricity and water grids in the mid-1950s and installed meters to track consumption, which were checked and read by Lebanese bill collectors.

Socioeconomic Conditions

Because Tal al-Za‘atar was located next to the largest industrial zone in Lebanon, in the early 1950s the camp drew thousands of Palestinian refugees from camps in the south of Lebanon, along with poor Lebanese from the towns and villages of the South and the Biqa‘ Valley and Syrian migrants from the Houran region and from the Golan Heights. ​​While some of these Palestinians and Lebanese moved into the camp to live, others, along with the Syrians, settled in shantytowns of tin shacks in the areas of al-Burj al-Aali and Tallet al-Mir, right next to the camp. Part of the population from the Dekwaneh suburb, called al-Dekwaneh al-Jadideh (New Dekwaneh), also became part of the geography of the camp. Most of them were Lebanese Shia who had been forced to migrate from two villages, Aitaroun and Ainata, in the Bint Jbeil district [in the South], in addition to Palestinian families whose financial status had improved enough for them to be able to purchase apartments in the same area. At that time, Tal al-Za‘atar camp and its surroundings became one of the most prominent markers of the “poverty belt” that encircled Beirut. By 1974, the camp had a population of 14,951 Palestinians.

Labor

In the years following the camp’s establishment, the residents of Tal al-Za‘atar made their living as farmworkers in the agricultural lands around the camp that extended from Antelias in the north to Jisr al-Basha and Hazmieh in the south, where they were employed in growing citrus fruits and vegetables. With the growth of the furniture, textile, and plastics industries in Lebanon in the 1950s and 1960s, factories spread over the areas of Mkalles and Dekwaneh in the vicinity of the camp. They attracted many residents of Tal al-Za‘atar and its immediate surroundings to work. Residents were also attracted by the manual labor opportunities made possible by the growth of the business of re-exportation or entrepot, called transit in local slang, and commercial activity in the Beirut port, as well as the growing service and real estate sectors in Lebanon in the 1960s and 1970s. However, the refugees from Tal al-Za‘atar who worked in these factories and workshops were not able to improve their standard of living much, because Lebanese law did not allow them to get benefits from social security, access health insurance, and obtain end of service pay.

In the 1970s, after the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) took control of Tal al-Za‘atar, the camp became the site for several small- and medium-scale projects in the social welfare field. In the early 1970s, the Fatah movement started sewing workshops affiliated to the Samid Foundation, which was a for-profit economic initiative launched by Fatah to provide employment opportunities for the people in the camps. Fatah also set up a workshop for weapons maintenance and repair inside Tal al-Za‘atar, which later grew into a full-fledged factory operated by the movement’s scientific committee, that served the purpose of maintaining and servicing light weaponry.

Services, Education, and Healthcare

In the early 1950s, UNRWA opened a school with a cafeteria in the camp that provided one full meal for children daily; it used some baraksat homes as temporary facilities for both. It also set up a center for distributing ration supplies (food aid). The agency’s services were managed from an office located between the cafeteria and the food aid center. In later years, UNRWA’s administrative office moved out of the camp and relocated to the Sinn al-Fil area.

Gradually, UNRWA established five schools in Tal al-Za‘atar that covered both primary and junior high school education. The schools, some of which were located outside the camp limits, all bore the names of cities in Palestine: Baysan, Jenin, Nazareth, Sanour, and al-Majdal. Those wishing to continue their education were obliged to go outside the camp and enroll in Lebanese government schools or schools run by charitable societies.

UNRWA also opened a center for convalescing patients with pulmonary diseases in Tal al-Za‘atar, which was also open to Palestinian refugees from outside the camp. The agency’s main medical clinic was located near the Mkalles roundabout and was open to refugees from both the Tal al-Za‘atar and Jisr al-Basha camps. In 1969, the Palestine Red Crescent Society established its own clinic inside Tal al-Za‘atar to compensate for the deficiencies of the UNRWA clinic. The Red Crescent clinic later grew into a hospital that was built on the site of an old mosque, where the upper floor of the building continued to be used as a mosque, while the actual hospital was on the ground floor.

The Evolution of Administration and the Fight for Control of the Camp

UNRWA’s functions in Tal al-Za‘atar were limited to services such as education, healthcare, and food aid. When it came to security, the intelligence branch of the Lebanese military, known as the Deuxième Bureau and the Lebanese gendarmerie, each established a post in the camp during the 1960s to implement police surveillance and ban political activities within the camp. They also imposed a whole list of prohibitions upon the camp’s residents, ranging from prohibiting any home renovations under penalty of fines, enforcing a curfew after 9 PM, banning any large meetings or gatherings, and even requiring a permit for receiving guests from outside the camp.

Coinciding with intermittent clashes between the Lebanese army and fidaʾiyeen [commando resistance fighters] from the Fatah and al-Saʿiqa movements in the South in November 1969, an uprising erupted in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, in which activists working in clandestine cells in Tal al-Za‘atar played a part. As a result, those working in the two Lebanese security services’ posts were forced to pack their belongings and leave within two days. These and other similar events culminated in the signing of an agreement between Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Executive Committee of the PLO, and General Emile Bustani, commander of the Lebanese Army representing the Lebanese government, in Cairo in November 1969. This agreement, brokered by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, aimed to regulate the relationship between the two parties.

In what was effectively an overthrow of state control over the camps, members of Palestinian fidaʾi organizations in the camps took the place of the personnel of the Lebanese Deuxième Bureau, bringing the camps under their authority. This meant a transformation of life for the refugees living in the camps on multiple levels. For the purpose of managing affairs inside the camps, the armed factions established popular committees whose task was to address helping the camp residents' in dealing with their day-to-day affairs. However, these committees failed in achieving this, while UNRWA continued to manage education, healthcare, and food relief.

As the population of Tal al-Za‘atar ballooned with the influx of new immigrants in the 1970s, Fatah expanded the scope of its organizing work within the camp, also making it a launching pad for the activities of its cadres outside the camp in East Beirut; so too did other factions like al-Saʿiqa, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), the PFLP-General Command (GC), and the Arab Liberation Front. The presence of the Palestinian factions and the activities of their representatives overshadowed the civil society work inside the camp, which was for all practical purposes limited to contributions through the help of activists from outside the camp. For instance, the DFLP enabled the Lebanese Amel Foundation to work inside the camp. Then, after 1973, students from the American University of Beirut took part in volunteer work inside the camp that was arranged for them by Fatah. The camp also had foreign volunteers present; one notable volunteer was Eva Stoll from Sweden, who worked in the PFLP’s medical dispensary and remained in the camp right until the evacuation of its residents and the massacres that took place on 12 August 1976. Significant work was done by volunteers from the Palestinian-Dutch Friendship Association, which would send between 40 to 50 volunteers to the camp during the summer. These volunteers would do sanitation work and dig shelters; they slept in the building of the Jenin School.

The Lebanese government crisis in May 1973 and its repercussions significantly impacted Tal al-Za‘atar, following the army’s failure to repel an Israeli commando operation in Beirut, during which three of the PLO leadership were assassinated. In the aftermath, which included clashes between Palestinian factions and the Lebanese army in Beirut, the camp came under direct artillery fire by the army, and its shells blew the corrugated iron roof panels [colloquially called zinco] off the camp’s homes. As a result, the camp then became a hotbed of political mobilization, resulting from the Lebanese internal polarization generated by the confrontation between the Lebanese army and the Palestinian resistance.

The incitement against the armed Palestinian presence in Lebanon by right-wing parties was also continuing to escalate. In this context, the potential danger attributed to Tal al-Za‘atar was magnified, particularly due to the growing military capabilities of the Palestinian factions present there and their expansion into the nearby mainly Shiite suburb of al-Naba‘a on the outskirts of Beirut, though it was not adjacent to the camp. In the eyes of the mainly Christian residents in the surrounding areas, the image of Tal al-Za‘atar became closer to that of a military camp rather than a refugee camp. By 1975, the camp had expanded and inched ever closer to the neighborhoods in its vicinity, and residents came into closer and closer contact with the residents of those neighborhoods. This consequently made the camp a flashpoint of conflicts resulting from this increasing friction in the years directly leading up to the civil war. Accordingly, the residents of these neighborhoods were anxious and fearful whenever they passed by the camp, so that by the time the civil war broke out in 1975, they regarded the camp with its civilian population as a foreign body.

This perception of Tal al-Za‘atar largely determined the camp’s fate, particularly after it became uniquely associated, unlike any of the other Palestinian camps in Lebanon, with the spark that ignited the Lebanese Civil War on 13 April 1975. A bus carrying Palestinian and Lebanese passengers from the camp was ambushed while passing through the Ain al-Rummaneh neighborhood, which was controlled by the Phalangist militias. The 26 passengers, who were on their way back to the camp after attending a military parade organized by the PFLP–GC in West Beirut, were massacred.

The Blockade and the Massacre

In early 1976, the Kataeb [Phalange] and Ahrar [National Liberal] parties and their allies (who included the Lebanese Youth Movement, or the Bash Maroun/Maroun Khoury Group; the Guardians of the Cedars; and al-Tanzim, known as the Lebanese Resistance Movement militias) decided to implement a policy of emptying the eastern and northern sectors of Beirut of all Palestinians and Muslims, so they attacked and took control of the Karantina-Maslakh [slaughterhouse] area, then the Dbayeh and Jisr al-Basha camps, the Naba‘a neighborhood, and finally Tal al-Za‘atar Camp. In early January 1976, the camp was subjected to a food supply blockade that intensified over the following seven months. When this blockade failed to fully achieve its objective, the Lebanese rightist militias put the population of the camp under a total siege, destroyed all their sources for accessing water and launched an assault using heavy weapons. After 52 days of resistance by the camp, an agreement was reached between the Palestinian factions and the Kataeb Party through mediation by an Arab League envoy to evacuate all civilians. But on the morning of 12 August, the day that had been set for the evacuation, the right-wing militias massacred the population, killing around 800 people. More than 3,400 had already been killed between 22 June and the eve of the evacuation, many of whom are still missing and whose fate remains unknown to this day. The camp was then promptly razed to the ground by bulldozers and never rebuilt.

The Survivors of the Camp

Displaced to Damour

After the massacre at Tal al-Za‘atar and the displacement of the majority of its residents to western Beirut and towns in the Biqa‘ Valley, the leadership of the Fatah movement decided to continue with resettling the displaced families from the camp in the coastal town of Damour in the Shouf region. This town’s own [mainly Christian] residents had been forcibly expelled in January 1976 following an assault by fighters from the Lebanese-Palestinian joint forces.

Fatah leader (and PLO Chairman) Yasir Arafat settled on this option because he wanted to gather the residents of Tal al-Za‘atar in one place, in order to preserve the continuity of the pre-existing social environment in the camp, in addition to making it easier to provide assistance to them. The move of the residents of Tal al-Za‘atar into al-Damour was preceded by the move of the families of the medical staff of the camp’s Red Crescent Hospital there, and the Red Crescent opened a clinic and health center there that was named al-Karama Hospital.

At the same time that the hospital in Damour was rehabilitated to become functioning again, Arafat tasked Palestinian poet Izz al-Din al-Manasra on 31 August 1976 with starting a school for the camp’s families that was named the Tal al-Za‘atar Boys and Girls’ School. Following pressure from the displaced families on UNRWA to take charge of education, the agency began a phased process, starting in early 1977, to open four schools in stages. These schools operated on a double-shift system for the primary and middle school levels. The new administration of the UNRWA school system named the four schools after Palestinian cities, including al-Majdal, Jenin, and Baysan.

Meanwhile, the Women’s Training Center, which was part of the Tal al-Za’atar Foundation established by the General Union of Palestinian Women, organized adult literacy classes and held sewing workshops. At the same time, the Beit Atfal al-Sumoud for orphaned children was set up in Beirut, founded as part of a collaborative effort by educators working at the PLO’s Planning Center. The association cared for 300 children aged between one and fifteen who had lost their parents during the civil war and the Tal al-Za‘atar massacre.

After the 1982 Invasion

The large-scale Israeli ground invasion of Lebanese territory in June 1982 dispersed the Palestinians residing in the town of Damour; their numbers began to dwindle over time due to repeated Israeli air raids on the town. On 9 June, three days after the beginning of the invasion, Israeli ground forces reached the outskirts of Damour, and on that day the Damour agricultural plain was the site of a major battle between a Palestinian force and two infantry divisions of the Israeli army.

After the Palestinian fighters and the leadership of the PLO were expelled from Beirut and forced to go into exile in five different Arab countries in September 1982, the remaining Palestinians still residing in Damour left the town permanently, joining the steady procession of those who had departed because of Israeli airstrikes targeting the area. The majority of them went to safer regions in the north and south; they became spread across more than twenty locations, including Barr Elias village and the Wavel Camp in the central Biqa‘ and the camps of al-Miyya wa Miyya and al-Sikka (an unofficial refugee camp) in the vicinity of Saida. Others headed to Rashidiyya and al-Burj al-Shamali camps near Tyre, as well as to the Beddawi and Nahr el-Bared camps up in the north of Lebanon.

Families from Tal al-Za‘atar who sought refuge in the two Palestinian refugee camps north of Tripoli were not directly affected by the Israeli invasion. In Beddawi, the camp’s Popular Committee and the Palestinian factions inside the camp facilitated the housing of the new arrivals in the UNRWA school buildings and then took charge of financing their accommodation in temporary dwellings. Thus, a community grew within the Beddawi Camp of families that had been originally displaced from Tal al-Za‘atar. This community, which had around 250 families, came to be known as Hayy Tal al-Za‘atar, or the Tal al-Za‘atar neighborhood.

In 2011, a group made up of former residents of Tal al-Za‘atar and their families, now living in the Mar Elias Camp in Beirut, took the initiative to establish an association dedicated to bringing together and reconnecting the members of the camp’s original community in Lebanon as well as abroad. Headed by Mohammad Abdo Daher, the association holds an annual event commemorating the fall of the camp and has also started a chapter in Berlin, where a number of former Tal al-Za‘atar residents now live.