A history of the hapless

摘要

Within the archipelago of misery made up by Lebanon's 12 Palestinian camps, Nahr al-Bared has been lucky. There were once 15 of the camps, which are not tent cities but dense warrens of breeze-block shanties. Three were flattened in Lebanon's civil war from 1975-90; their residents, descended from Palestinians who had fled the advancing Israelis in 1948, were made refugees twice over. Appalling massacres by Lebanese Christian militias, with the connivance of Israel, at Sabra and Shatila, on the fringes of the Lebanese capital, Beirut, laid waste to those camps.