Drifting

Thousands forced to live in ruins of Lebanon war

By TERRY A. ANDERSON

Drifting — The Jackson Sun, 9 July 1982 — The Jackson Sun · 9 July 1982

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Transcribed from the clipping

RASHIDIYEH, Lebanon (AP) — Between 5,000 and 7,000 Palestinian women, children and old men have drifted back to this former refugee camp and PLO guerrilla base to live in the rubble left by Israeli forces that drove them out more than three weeks ago.

Only a half-dozen young men could be seen on the streets and among the ruined houses where the women and children sat quietly. The only bustle is at a former school where the International Red Cross is distributing food and blankets, the refugees’ sole aid apart from UNICEF water trucks that come in to refill cisterns.

The homeless here are among tens of thousands — estimates vary widely — that have been driven from place to place in southern Lebanon by the Israeli-Palestinian war. Some said they came back to Rashidiyeh because the Lebanese blamed the Palestinians for the Israeli invasion and didn’t want them to stay in their towns. The director of the U.S.

Agency for International Development, Peter McPherson, toured the area Thursday and said the job of caring for the refugees was only beginning. “The destruction is much more than (estimates) we got from outside sources,” McPherson said, adding that his agency’s relief money would be aimed at “helping the people help themselves.”

Many of those returning here were among the 3,000-4,000 who lived in a nearby orange grove for two weeks after the Israelis invaded Lebanon on June 6 and drove out the Palestine Liberation Organization guerrillas based in Rashidiyeh, who had been a thorn in Israel’s side. The camp is only 10 miles north of the Israeli frontier.

The Israeli military denied the refugees aid. Army officers said they were trying to force the Palestinians to leave. An old man, dressed in a kaftan and wearing glasses with one shattered lens, said he and his family fled to Tyre during the Israeli attack, but their Lebanese neighbors’ resentment had forced them to leave.

“They didn’t want Palestinans there because of the bombing,” he said. Joe Jacobs of AID said the Palestinian-Lebanese friction made relief work more difficult. “The lowest on the totem pole are the (refugee) Palestinians,” he said.

“We tried to distribute some food to Palestinian women and children in Tyre, and the Lebanese in the street were very angry. The resentment is strong.”

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by optical character recognition and not by a person. The clipping carries no masthead or date line, so its date and newspaper rest on the record it arrived with, not on anything visible in the scan.

Context added by this archive

Date check: No masthead or page date line survives — the clipping is trimmed to the headline block, the photograph and caption, and five text columns. Nothing on it names the paper or the date, so 1982-07-09 and “The Jackson Sun” could not be verified.

The internal timing (“drove them out more than three weeks ago”, an invasion dated June 6, a McPherson tour “Thursday”) is consistent with early July 1982.

Cite this clipping

"Drifting," The Jackson Sun, 9 July 1982. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1982-052. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1982-052