Fend Abu Nour, a leader in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian camp in Lebanon, seen on Oct. 19.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
At a cemetery outside the Shatila refugee camp in south Beirut, a crowd in black gathered Thursday for the funeral of a Hezbollah fighter killed in clashes this week with Israeli troops.
One round of gunfire was followed by another, punctuating Fend Abu Nour’s sentences as he spoke nearby. “What we are doing here at the camp is showing emotional support to our people in Palestine,” he said. “Because it’s the only thing we can do.”
The night before, buses transported people from this and other Palestinian camps to the U.S. embassy in Beirut, where soldiers used tear gas and water cannons to block attempts to storm the diplomatic compound.
“The goal is to send a message to the Americans,” said Mr. Abu Nour. “We let them know that they are complicit in what’s happening.”
Few people have followed the events of the past 12 days more closely than Lebanon’s Palestinians, a community of roughly 210,000, many with roots that date back to 1948, when their families fled here during the Arab-Israeli War.
When Hamas and other militants launched an Oct. 7 attack from Gaza, massacring Israelis, cheers erupted in Palestinian camps.
When Israel then laid siege to Gaza in its iron-fisted reprisal campaign, Palestinians here began to look for ways to respond.
In other parts of the world, Palestinians have raised money for humanitarian goods to be sent to the Gaza Strip, in the hope they will soon be allowed to enter.
Such generosity is difficult in Lebanon, a country still in the grip of a ruinous financial and political crisis that has fallen especially hard on Palestinians, who are barred from numerous forms of employment.
“You’re taking food off your table in order to help your family in Gaza,” said Mohammad Hasanein, a volunteer at Al-Shifaa for Medical and Humanitarian Services, a medical aid group.
Instead, Palestinians in Lebanon have sought to use their own history with Israel to lend moral weight to pleas for the international community to oppose Israel’s reprisals on Gaza.
They are also preparing to fight Israel directly.
Mr. Hasanein keeps a photo on the wall of his brother, who was killed in a 2001 protest at the border with Israel. He lives in the Shatila camp, which along with the adjacent community of Sabra has become a byword for Israeli violence, after a 1982 massacre committed by Lebanese Christian militants with the authorization of Israel’s military, whose tanks surrounded the camp at the time. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed inside.
“I basically drank Israeli tragedy from my mother’s breast,” Mr. Hasanein said.
War in Gaza has brought fresh tragedy. Fouad Baker’s extended family there counts 26 killed since Oct. 7.
Unable to help because he is in Lebanon, he has instead put his skills to work in other ways. On Thursday afternoon, he sat at a computer, shoulders draped with a Palestinian keffiyeh, and spoke on a Zoom call with representatives of the Workers’ Party in Ireland – one of a number of European leftist groups that have expressed interest in what is happening to Palestinians.
“Every current Palestinian family has a martyr,” Mr. Baker responded. He offered a defence of the violence from Gaza, saying nothing else will compel the international community to demand a Palestinian state.
“The only solution for the Palestinian people is to continue resistance,” he said.
Mr. Baker is an electromechanical engineer educated in international law who holds a master’s degree in non-violence and human rights. Lebanon’s restrictions on Palestinian workers mean he has to make a living tutoring high school students in math and physics – and even that work is technically illegal.
But over the past two weeks he has spent his time and talents speaking with anyone who will listen about what is happening in Gaza. He has sought to gather evidence of war crimes from connections there and worked to co-ordinate jurists building an International Criminal Court case against Israel – which has itself accumulated grisly documentation of brutality against its civilians in the Oct. 7 attacks, some of it recorded by Hamas militants themselves.
Mr. Baker calls it his duty to speak for those in Gaza, who are living without electricity and under regular bombardment and cannot easily speak for themselves.
“This is our struggle. This is our resistance,” he said.
Others are also trying to help. Mohamad Hussein has worked with a group posting multiple videos a day to social media, seeking to draw attention to the Palestinian cause. It’s a longstanding effort, but he hopes to take advantage of a worldwide audience that, since Oct. 7, has grown more open to hearing from Palestinians.
“Pressure from the international community is very important,” he said.
Reaching that audience, however, can be difficult. Palestinian content is often screened by social media platforms. Israel has called on X owner Elon Musk and others to rid their services of antisemitic content.
Israel has made its own appeals to the international community, gathering images of the Oct. 7 attack and showing them as evidence of the horrors visited by Palestinian militants to the world’s most powerful people. By contrast, the Irish Workers’ Party won a single seat in 2019 local elections.
The imbalance is not lost on Palestinians in Lebanon, who have also contemplated more direct ways to respond to Israel.
What has happened in the past two weeks is “something encouraging a lot of young people to say: Enough talk, enough demonstrations, enough expressions of support for our Palestinian people. We want deeds,” said Suhail Al Natour, a central committee member of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and a leader in Mar Elias, another Palestinian camp in Beirut.
Since Oct. 7, he says, some young Palestinians have gravitated toward Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed, heavily armed militia that stands poised to open a second front with Israel from Lebanon.
It’s not just the youth. If war breaks out in Lebanon, others say they would welcome the chance to battle Israeli forces.
“Our people are not going to remain idle or silent. When the time comes and a front is opened between Lebanon and Israel, we are willing to fight,” said Mr. Abu Nour, who is himself a leader in Sabra and Shatila.
“And I will be the first one.”