BEIRUT: International donors have not sent any money for the Palestinian refugees and Lebanese affected by the conflict at the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, more than six weeks after Premier Fouad Siniora asked a donor conference for $55 million, a number of relief officials said. The hundreds of refugee families returning to the battle-scarred camp are facing desperate conditions, although their departure from public schools near the camp has at least begun to release the tensions between the displaced and the Lebanese locals, said Ambassador Khalil Makkawi, head of the Lebanese-Palestinian Dialogue Committee. Over three months of fighting between the Lebanese Army and Fatah al-Islam militants largely destroyed the camp and its environs, while the camp’s 31,000-plus residents fled soon after the hostilities began.

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Last weekend, thirteen bodies, most likely of Palestinian refugees from Iraq, were recovered on the coast of Italy after their boats, carrying at least 127 persons in search of safety, had broken apart. These tragedies highlight the failure of the international community to protect Palestinian refugees.

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A Palestinian Camp in Lebanon is Burned and Destroyed and the World is Silent.

Nahr Al Bared is a Palestinian refugee camp in the north of Lebanon which has been home to about 40,000 Palestinian people, most of whom are the children and grandchildren of those who left Palestine in 1948. Some like Abu Mohammad were born in Palestine. He was ten years old, and next year it will be sixty years since the formation of the State of Israel was achieved through the ethnic cleansing of Abu Mohammad and so many others from their home in Palestine. He told me this as the two of us sat alone in the pitch dark while rats ran around beside our chairs at his house. As I left he went in to sleep alone amongst ashes and rodents, with no neighbours around him, trying to believe that he still has something left to protect.

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Sunday, November 11th, 8pm.
La Sala Rossa, 4848 St. Laurent
Doors: Suggested Donation 10$
Montreal, Quebec

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The Shin Bet is refusing to allow a 21-year-old Rafiah man who is sick with cancer and in need of immediate medical care to come to Israel, even though he obtained permission from the Israeli Defense Forces’ Coordination and Liaison Administration.

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BEIRUT: The Lebanese Army opened fire on Israeli warplanes flying low over South Lebanon on Thursday, in the first incident of its kind since the summer 2006 war. “Israeli warplanes were flying lower than usual over Lebanon and so we fired at them,” a senior army source told The Daily Star, confirming that gunners fired on intruding aircraft twice.

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Exhibit Opening: Thursday November 1st, 7pm
Gallery SCYAP. 253 3rd Avenue South, Saskatoon, SK.
Exhibit Runs: November 1 – November 22, 2007

Please join us on opening night for a presentation by the artist. Stefan Christoff is traveling from Montreal to show us the photographs he took in Lebanon in 2005 and 2006…

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BEIRUT: The Lebanese government must take concrete steps to end all forms of discrimination against Palestinian refugees and to fully protect and uphold their human rights, Amnesty International said in a new report expected to be launched at a news conference in Beirut on Wednesday.

The new report, “Exiled and Suffering: Palestinian refugees in Lebanon,” examines the wide range of restrictions that continue to impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, as many as 60 years after they or their parents or grandparents fled to Lebanon during the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948 and 1967.

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In the context of the campaign to challenge the listing of Hezbollah as a ‘terrorist’ organization in Canada, on Wednesday, October 17th, Tadamon! Montreal hosted a major lecture at McGill University as part of Culture Shock 2007.

Upwards of 200 people gathered to hear presentations from Bilal Elamine, the former editor of Left Turn Magazine, currently living in Beirut, Lebanon and Brian Aboud, a sociologist and historian active within Tadamon!. In addition a documentary film on the 2006 Israeli attack on Lebanon, “A Summer Not to Forget”, by the Lebanese filmmaker Carol Mansour, was screened for the first time in Canada.

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Officially, Mahmoud Jnaid does not exist. The 25-year-old Palestinian almost made that a reality earlier this month when he doused himself with petrol and tried to set himself alight.

Jnaid is one of about 54,000 displaced Palestinians who returned to Gaza and the West Bank from abroad after an interim peace accord in 1993, but still have no identity cards because Israel refuses to approve them. Following years of silence, they recently started holding weekly protests in Hamas-run Gaza to demand the documents, which they need to travel as well as for daily basics like opening a bank account or getting a driving licence.

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