All 12 official refugee camps in [Lebanon]suffer from serious problems - no proper infrastructure, overcrowding, poverty and unemployment. [Lebanon] has the highest percentage of Palestine refugees who are living in abject poverty and who are registered with the Agency's ‘special hardship’ programme."
Today, some 300,000 Palestinian refugees reside in Lebanon and constitute nearly a tenth of the country’s population. They constitute one of the world’s most long-established refugee populations and they remain in a form of limbo. They also remain subject to various restrictions in the host country, Lebanon, which places them in a situation akin to that of second class citizens and denies them access to their full range of human rights, even though most of them were born and raised in Lebanon. Thousands have been further displaced even while in exile in Lebanon: some 30,000 remain displaced by the May-September 2007 clashes between the Fatah al-Islam armed group and Lebanese armed forces at the Nahr al-Bared camp. Just over half – some 53 percent - of Palestinian refugees who live in Lebanon, reside in war-torn, decaying and poverty-stricken camps. The conditions for those living outside the camps in towns, "gatherings", villages and rural areas, are also poor.