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
US lawmakers press Israel to probe strike on reporters in Lebanon
- “The IDF has made no effort, none, to seriously investigate this incident,” Welch said
- Collins called for Washington to publicly acknowledge the attack in which an American citizen was injured
WASHINGTON: Several Democratic lawmakers called Thursday for the Israeli and US governments to fully investigate a deadly 2023 attack by the Israeli military on journalists in southern Lebanon.
The October 13, 2023 airstrike killed Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah and wounded six other reporters, including two from AFP — video journalist Dylan Collins and photographer Christina Assi, who lost her leg.
“We expect the Israeli government to conduct an investigation that meets the international standards and to hold accountable those people who did this,” Senator Peter Welch told a news conference, with Collins by his side.
The lawmaker from Collins’s home state of Vermont said he had been pushing for answers for two years, first from the administration of Democratic president Joe Biden and now from the Republican White House of Donald Trump.
The Israeli government has “stonewalled at every single turn,” Welch added.
“With the Israeli government, we have been extremely patient, and we have done everything we reasonably can to obtain answers and accountability,” he said.
“The IDF has made no effort, none, to seriously investigate this incident,” Welch said, referring to the Israeli military, adding that it has told his office its investigation into the incident is closed.
Collins called for Washington to publicly acknowledge the attack in which an American citizen was injured.
“But I’d also like them to put pressure on their greatest ally in the Middle East, the Israeli government, to bring the perpetrators to account,” he said, echoing the lawmakers who called the attack a “war crime.”
“We’re not letting it go,” Vermont congresswoman Becca Balint said. “It doesn’t matter how long they stonewall us.”
AFP conducted an independent investigation which concluded that two Israeli 120mm tank shells were fired from the Jordeikh area in Israel.
The findings were corroborated by other international probes, including investigations conducted by Reuters, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders.
Unlike Welch’s assertion Thursday that the Israeli probe was over, the IDF told AFP in October that “findings regarding the event have not yet been concluded.”
