Million Homeless Palestinian Arabs Camped in Middle East

By Cynthia Davis, Women’s National News Service, Beirut, Lebanon

Transcribed from the clipping

“Beirut, Lebanon — Nearly a million homeless Palestinian Arab refugees are camped out in the torrid lands of the Middle East today. In Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt, women and their husbands and children are living in tent cities or mud huts, cellars or stalls of horse barracks — one stall to a family, with a curtain of tattered potato sacks for a doorway… ‘This is my only home,’ said a middle-aged woman in tears as she surveyed her dirty cellar. ‘I am ashamed to live in such filth. We were never rich, but my husband used to own his own drygoods store, and we were clean.’ Down the road an aged grandmother was sitting cross-legged on the ground. Before her was a tiny bundle of burlap, and suddenly it stirred. ‘This is my granddaughter,’ the white-haired woman said, raising her hurt and bewildered eyes. ‘Her mother is dead. How am I going to take care of her?’ … in a tent city, only one family in every four or so has a kerosene stove to cook on… With a rationing of one half a cake of soap per person every two weeks, there is not much hope of keeping things clean.”

Photograph caption

“Rags are their only clothes.” · “Many live in ‘caves’ made from huge rocks, roofed with rags.” · “‘De luxe’ housing is this barracks. Each family has a compartment.”

Context added by this archive

Printed directly beside a Genesee Furniture advertisement: a free plastic lounge rocker with any living room suite, and a two-piece Kroehler suite in mohair frieze at $149.95.

Cite this item

"Million Homeless Palestinian Arabs Camped in Middle East," The Flint Journal, 13 August 1953. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1953-002. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1953-002

Elsewhere in the archive

U.N. Urged To Set Up Fund To Resettle Arab RefugeesPortland Press Herald · 26 October 1953 · the same year

This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American and Anglophone newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1812 to 2022. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.

The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the wire service that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. The city is derived from the masthead, not read off the clipping.

Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-1953-002.

See it in the archive reel · Full text of every clipping · Dataset