SIDON: Three days of fighting in south Lebanon’s Ain Al-Helweh Palestinian refugee camp have left at least 11 dead and dozens wounded, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees said on Monday.
Clashes broke out over the weekend between members of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas’s secular Fatah movement and Islamist militants based in the camp, Lebanon’s largest located in the coastal city of Sidon.
Renewed gunfire and shelling on Monday shook the camp, said an AFP correspondent in Sidon, sending frightened residents fleeing.
“According to reports, 11 were killed and another 40 were injured, including one staff member” of UNRWA, said Dorothee Klaus, the UN agency’s director in Lebanon.
She added in a statement that UNRWA has “temporarily suspended” operations in the camp due to the fighting.
Palestinian factions said they had agreed on a truce on Sunday but it did not hold, with fighting continuing with automatic weapons and rocket fire.
Officials said five Fatah members and one militant had been killed in the initial violence over the weekend.
There was no immediate word on the identities of the other fatalities.
“UNRWA urgently calls on all parties to immediately return to calm and take all measures necessary to protect civilians, including children,” Klaus said.
The statement noted that “two UNRWA schools have sustained damaged” and more than 2,000 Ain Al-Helweh residents had been forced to flee.
An AFP correspondent on Monday morning saw dozens of people, mostly women and children, leaving the camp carrying light luggage, while others took refuge in a nearby mosque.
Shells also fell outside the camp, AFP journalists said, with a nearby hospital evacuating patients and shops in Sidon closing fearing further escalation.
By long-standing convention, the Lebanese army does not enter Palestinian refugee camps in the country — now bustling but impoverished urban districts — leaving the factions themselves to handle security.
“We fled from the scene of the fighting, shells are raining in the streets,” a 75-year-old woman told AFP, requesting anonymity for security concerns.
She said armed factions were carrying weapons “to fight Israel, not to fight each other and become displaced.”
Ain Al-Helweh, now home to more than 54,000 registered refugees, was created for Palestinians who were driven out or fled during the 1948 war that coincided with Israel’s creation.
In recent years, they have been joined by thousands of Palestinians who had been living in Syria and fled the war there.
Palestinian armed groups in Lebanon rarely confront Israel nowadays, but fighting between rival factions is common in Ain Al-Helweh.
The latest violence began late Saturday, killing an Islamist and injuring six others, a Palestinian source inside the camp had told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons.
The next day, a Fatah military leader and four of his colleagues were killed during a “heinous operation,” the group said.
Tiny Lebanon hosts an estimated 250,000 Palestinian refugees, according to UNRWA.
Most Palestinians, including more than 30,000 who fled the war in neighboring Syria after 2011, live in one of Lebanon’s 12 official camps, and face a variety of legal restrictions, including on employment.
UN reports 11 killed as clashes rock Lebanon Palestinian camp
https://arab.news/bt2hf
UN reports 11 killed as clashes rock Lebanon Palestinian camp
- Clashes erupted on Sunday after militants shot and killed a Palestinian military general from the Fatah group
- Some residents in Sidon neighborhoods near the camp fled their homes as stray bullets hit buildings
The UN says Al-Hol camp population has dropped sharply as Syria moves to relocate remaining families
The UN says Al-Hol camp population has dropped sharply as Syria moves to relocate remaining families
- Forces of Syria’s central government captured the Al-Hol camp on Jan. 21 during a weekslong offensive against the SDF, which had been running the camp near the border with Iraq for a decade
DAMASCUS: The UN refugee agency said Sunday that a large number of residents of a camp housing family members of suspected Daesh group militants have left and the Syrian government plans to relocate those who remain.
Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, UNHCR’s representative in Syria, said in a statement that the agency “has observed a significant decrease in the number of residents in Al-Hol camp in recent weeks.”
“Syrian authorities have informed UNHCR of their plan to relocate the remaining families to Akhtarin camp in Aleppo Governorate (province) and have requested UNHCR’s support to assist the population in the new camp, which we stand ready to provide,” he said.
He added that UNHCR “will continue to support the return and reintegration of Syrians who have departed Al-Hol, as well as those who remain.”
The statement did not say how residents had left the camp or how many remain. Many families are believed to have escaped either during the chaos when government forces captured the camp from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces last month or afterward.
There was no immediate statement from the Syrian government and a government spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
At its peak after the defeat of IS in Syria in 2019, around 73,000 people were living at Al-Hol. Since then, the number has declined with some countries repatriating their citizens. The camp’s residents are mostly children and women, including many wives or widows of IS members.
The camp’s residents are not technically prisoners and most have not been accused of crimes, but they have been held in de facto detention at the heavily guarded facility.
Forces of Syria’s central government captured the Al-Hol camp on Jan. 21 during a weekslong offensive against the SDF, which had been running the camp near the border with Iraq for a decade. A ceasefire deal has since ended the fighting.
Separately, thousands of accused IS militants who were held in detention centers in northeastern Syria have been transferred to Iraq to stand trial under an agreement with the US
The US military said Friday that it had completed the transfer of more than 5,700 adult male IS suspects from detention facilities in Syria to Iraqi custody.
Iraq’s National Center for International Judicial Cooperation said a total of 5,704 suspects from 61 countries who were affiliated with IS — most of them Syrian and Iraqi — were transferred from prisons in Syria. They are now being interrogated in Iraq.
