Lebanon’s Palestinian camps a ‘time bomb’: ICG

Lebanon’s 12 Palestinian refugee camps are breeding grounds for extremist groups and constitute a “time bomb” that needs urgent attention, the International Crisis Group think-tank said Thursday.

Successive Lebanese governments were largely to blame for a “catastrophic” situation in the camps which were set up after the creation of Israel in 1948, the Brussels-based ICG said in a report.

“Marginalised, deprived of basic political and economic rights, trapped in the camps, bereft of realistic prospects, heavily armed and standing amid multiple fault lines… the refugee population constitutes a time bomb,” it warned.

According to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), there are between 350,000 and 400,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon — a country of more than four million inhabitants — most of them living in 12 camps.