BEIRUT: A Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon has been put on lockdown after the UN announced the first confirmed case of coronavirus in one of the country’s numerous and crowded camps.
The patient, a Palestinian refugee from Syria, has been taken to the state-run Rafic Hariri hospital in Beirut, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said in a statement late Tuesday.
Medical experts were due to visit the Wavel camp in the eastern Bekaa Valley later on Wednesday to carry out tests, the agency added.
The testing will focus on the woman’s relatives and people she has interacted with, as well as 50 others chosen arbitrarily “inside the camp and its surroundings,” said Lebanon’s official National News Agency.
In coordination with Lebanese security forces, Palestinian factions in charge of security have imposed a lockdown on the camp, preventing anyone from entering or leaving, the NNA report said.
The United Nations and aid groups have repeatedly warned that refugees and migrants in crowded camps worldwide are at special risk of the new coronavirus.
More than 70 million people globally been forced by conflict, persecution, violence and abuses to flee their homes, including more than 20 million people living as refugees, according to UN data.
More than 2,000 people live in Wavel, according to statistics released by Lebanon’s government after a 2017 census, but the UN agency says the population of those registered in the camp are much higher.
Aid groups have warned that hundreds of thousands of Palestinian and Syrian refugees living in Lebanon’s overcrowded camps are the most vulnerable and that self-isolating patients in the camps where sanitation is weak would be one of the top challenges.
“The main concern remains... the spread of coronavirus in the overcrowded Palestine refugee camps where there are very limited possibilities for home isolation,” an UNRWA spokeswoman said earlier this month.
More than 174,000 Palestinians live in Lebanon, according to official figures, with most residing in camps ruled by Palestinian factions beyond the reach of Lebanese security forces.
But unofficial estimates say the Palestinians, whose forefathers fled the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, could number as many as 500,000.
And out of the 1.5 million Syrians Lebanon says it hosts since the civil war broke out in the neighboring country nine years ago, nearly one million are registered with the UN as refugees.
So far just one Palestinian, who lives outside a camp, and three Syrians have tested positive in Lebanon for COVID-19 compared to 677 infections and 21 deaths across the country, according to officials.
First virus case in Lebanon Palestinian refugee camp: UN
https://arab.news/ynp73
First virus case in Lebanon Palestinian refugee camp: UN
- The patient, a Palestinian refugee from Syria, has been taken to the state-run Rafic Hariri hospital in Beirut
- More than 174,000 Palestinians live in Lebanon, according to official figures
20 Palestinian families abandon homes near Jericho after repeated attacks by settlers
- The families belong to Az-Zayed clan, one of the few remaining Bedouin communities in the occupied West Bank and Jordan Valley
LONDON: Repeated attacks by Israeli settlers have forced 20 Palestinian families to leave their homes in the Shallal Al-Auja community north of Jericho and move to another area, Al-Baidar Organization for the Defense of Bedouin Rights said on Tuesday.
The families belong to Az-Zayed clan, one of the few remaining Bedouin communities in the occupied West Bank and Jordan Valley, the organization said. Their way of life is under threat as a result of settler policies, as well as limited access to water and land, it added.
The clan has faced an increase in attacks by settlers in recent months, the Palestinian Wafa news agency reported, including threats, denial of access to pastures, and vandalism of properties.
Al-Baidar said that actions of the settlers “were an integral part of a structured scheme to displace indigenous Palestinians from the Jordan Valley and take over their land to make room for colonial settlement construction.”
Excluding East Jerusalem, which was occupied and annexed by Israel in 1967, there are about 3 million Palestinians and 500,000 Israeli settlers living in the West Bank.
