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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Lebanon
Index
After the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, between
100,000 and 170,000 Palestinian refugees entered Lebanon. They were
mostly Muslims and nearly all Arabs, but they also included some
Armenians, Greeks, and Circassians. During their first two decades
in Lebanon, the Palestinian refugees emerged as politically
powerful players
(see
The Hilu Era, (1964-70), ch. 1).
The number of
Palestinians in Lebanon swelled as a result of the war between the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Jordanian Armed
Forces and the subsequent expulsion of several thousand Palestinian
guerrillas from Jordan in 1970.
In 1987 a large number of Palestinians still lived in or around
camps administered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency
(UNRWA) for Palestine refugees in the Near East. In 1975 there were
sixteen officially designated UNRWA camps in Lebanon, but in
1975-76 the Maronite militias evicted thousands of Palestinians
from the suburbs of East Beirut and demolished their camps. By 1986
there were only eleven camps in Lebanon
(see fig. 4, Palestinian
Refugee Camps in Lebanon, 1986). Many relatively well-off
Palestinians lived outside the camps. In 1984 the United States
Department of State estimated that 400,000 Palestinians were living
in Lebanon, whereas the PLO claimed the figure to be as high as
600,000.
Data as of December 1987
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