Lebanon’s Palestinian refugees fear for their families in Gaza

In a ramshackle Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, Hayat Shehadeh wrings her hands as she watches the Israel-Hamas war. Her daughter is in Gaza, and she has not spoken to her for a week.

“I can’t sleep. I get up at 3:00 am… I go to watch the television,” said the 69-year-old from her dark flat in south Beirut’s Burj al-Barajneh Palestinian camp.

“Sometimes she writes to me, ‘I’m fine’. She doesn’t write more than that” because she has no way to recharge her phone battery, said the elderly woman, a baby grandchild playing with a Palestinian flag on the floor nearby.

Gaza-based Hamas militants attacked southern Israel on October 7, killing 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and taking about 240 hostage, according to Israeli officials.

Israel has since carried out a relentless air and ground offensive in Gaza that the Hamas government says has killed some 12,000 people, including thousands of women and children.

With pain in her voice but trying to maintain her composure, Shehadeh said her daughter had separated her three children, sending them away with different relatives.

“She was crying, she said ‘I split up the kids’,” her mother said, so that “if someone dies, they don’t all die.”

The Burj al-Barajneh camp is a labyrinth of alleyways, some bearing pictures of former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, or stencils and posters in support of Hamas and other Palestinian groups, some glorifying the October 7 attacks.

Lebanon hosts an estimated 250,000 Palestinian refugees, many living in the country’s 12 official camps, according to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).

– ‘Dear to me’ –

Shehadeh said her daughter, aged in her thirties, had been living in Lebanon in recent years but a few months ago “her husband came and took her” back to Gaza.

“She’s moving around… I don’t know what area she’s in now,” Shehadeh said, requesting the young woman not be identified by name.

More than 1.5 million people have been internally displaced in Gaza, and UN agencies have warned of rapidly deteriorating conditions.

UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini has described children sheltering at a UN school “pleading for a sip of water or for a loaf of bread”.

On Friday, network provider Paltel group said communications with Gaza were severed due to a lack of fuel.

Shehadeh’s family came to Lebanon from the Acre area, now in northern Israel, survivors of what Palestinians call the Nakba, or the “catastrophe”, when more than 760,000 Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes by the 1948 war over Israel’s creation.

She said the family had feared for their lives, including after Jewish paramilitary groups massacred more than 100 Palestinian villagers at Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem, in April that year.