Lebanese forces battled members

of an Islamic radical group in a

Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli

Squalid living conditions in Lebanon's refugee camps

is constant source of recruitment and support

for Fatah al-Islam among Palestinians

The Resource Center for Palestinian Residency

and Refugee Rights — BADIL — estimates that today

there are more than 7 million

Palestinian refugees and displaced persons

According to Akram, about one in three refugees

in the world is Palestinian and more than

two-thirds of Palestinians are
refugees

What is Fatah Islam/

The leader: Fugitive Shaker al-Absi, a Palestinian in his early 50s who supports the ideology of Osama bin Laden, has been identified as the leader of the shadowy radical group Fatah Islam. He is believed to have fought in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The base: It's in the Palestinian refugee camp Nahr el-Bared in northern Lebanon, but the group has expanded to Tripoli.

The group: It surfaced last fall and has as many as 100 members from Arab countries including Saudi Arabia and Syria and sympathizers who belong to the Salafi branch of Islam, security officials said.

The Lebanese Broadcasting Corp. TV station reported that among the slain fighters were men from Bangladesh and Yemen.

Security officials said the group split last year from the Syria-based Fatah Uprising, itself a 1980s splinter of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's mainstream Fatah.

The new outbreak of violence in Lebanon should remind us again that the Palestinian problem is the real problem of the Middle East, the origin of all the other ones.

Tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees live in Lebanon. They started arriving in 1948, when they lost their territories due to the creation of the State of Israel, and mainly in 1967, when Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza.

They settled in refugee camps that became little cities, as houses substituted the tents. Actually twelve camps are situated in Lebanon.

They form a kind of State within the Lebanese State. Palestinians administer the camps and have their own militia. The Lebanese army never enters the camps.

Palestinians tried to continue their resistance against Israel from Lebanon, which had two consequences:

Firstly, the outbreak of Lebanese civil war of 1979 and, secondly, the invasion of South Lebanon by Israel in 1982.

Actually, Lebanese Palestinians are seen well by the Shiite party Hizbollah who consider them as their allies, whereas Christians and president Siniora look at them with suspicion.

Siniora ordered troops to surround some of the Palestinian camps to better control one of the Palestinian militia, Fatah Islam, accused of several attacks.

That’s what unleashed the clashes and put Lebanon on the edge of disaster.

59 Years of Exile for Palestinians

For Palestinians, May 15 represents the date when they lost 78 percent of their historic homeland and the date that turned them into the world's oldest and largest refugee population.

Palestinians refer to May 15 as the al-Nakba, or catastrophe, to describe their dispossession when over 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled prior to, during and after the 1948 war.

This May, Palestinians memorialize 59 years of exile as Israelis celebrate 59 years of statehood.

Seven Million Palestinian Refugees

The Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights — BADIL — estimates that today there are more than 7 million Palestinian refugees and displaced persons. According to Akram, about one in three refugees in the world is Palestinian and more than two-thirds of Palestinians are refugees.

BADIL places Palestinians who were displaced and expelled from their homes in 1948 and their descendents into one group. Of those, 4.3 million are registered for assistance with the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and 1.7 million are unregistered, not eligible for assistance.

Another group is comprised of Palestinians displaced for the first time from their homes in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.

They are referred to as the "1967 displaced persons." They and their descendents number approximately 834,000.

BADIL identifies two internally displaced groups — Palestinians internally displaced in 1948, who BADIL estimates at 355,000, and the 1967 internally displaced Palestinians of approximately 57,000.

According to BADIL, most refugees live within 100 miles of Israel’s border. Half of the refugees live in Jordan, one-fourth in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and approximately 15 percent live in Syria and Lebanon.

The remainder live scattered around the world, primarily in the rest of the Arab world, Europe and the Americas.

More than 1.3 million Palestinian refugees live in 59 U.N.-administered refugee camps in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon and twelve unrecognized refugee camps: five in the West Bank, three in Jordan and four in Syria.

According to the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics (2004 census), there are 9.6 million Palestinians worldwide.