Sunday, September 10, 2023
Elder of Ziyon#فيديو | تجدد الاشتباكات المسلحة في مخيم عين الحلوة جنوبي #لبنان. pic.twitter.com/eoEHrQFtFv
— قناة الأقصى الفضائية (@SerajSat) September 8, 2023
Many residents are seeking shelter elsewhere
The International Committee of the Red Cross worked with the Sidon government to set up tents in the municipal stadium in order to accommodate hundreds of residents seeking a safe place for their families until the situation stabilizes.
And then something happened that has happened to the Palestinians in Lebanon for 75 years. Their "leaders" decided what was best for them, and rejected the tent shelters.
The Director General of the 302nd Committee for Defending Refugee Rights (an independent organization based in Beirut), Ali Huwaidi, rejected the decision of the Red Cross in Lebanon to set up tents in the municipal stadium square, in the city of Sidon, to shelter Palestinian refugees displaced from the “Ain al-Hilweh” camp.Huwaidi said, in a special statement to Quds Press on Saturday evening, that the refusal is because the sight of the tents brings back to the memory of the Nakba for Palestinians, the suffering they went through in 1948, when they lived in tents for years.
The residents aren't even given a choice of whether they would rather have their own spaces to live in, or crowd into mosques and schools with hundreds of others.
Certainly the residents who prefer not to live in tents can choose to crowd into UNRWA schools, but their supposed "leaders" don't even want them to have that choice.
As it stands, residents stuck in mosques and schools who heard about the tent camps on WhatsApp rushed to take shelter there, but the ICRC stopped them, saying that UNRWA needs to choose who gets to use the tents in an orderly fashion.
This violence and chaos is what a Palestinian state would look like.
