The Real Apartheid in the Middle East

by Khaled Abu Toameh

• Where is the outcry from Amnesty International and other human rights organizations? When an Arab country subjects Palestinians to actual apartheid measures, the international community is too busy lying about Israel's alleged abuses to take notice.
• "It is estimated that 65% of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon live under the poverty line." — UNRWA, October 2017.
• Palestinians in Lebanon have long been prevented from practicing such professions as medicine and law, given that only the Lebanese could join professional syndicates.
• Thirty-nine professions remain prohibited to Palestinians in the following fields: healthcare (general medicine, dentistry, nursing, midwifery, pharmacy) transport and fishing, services and daycare, engineering, law, tourism, and accounting.
• Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are at risk of food insecurity, electricity blackouts, increased health problems and complications amid the shortages of medicine and health-care interventions. — UNRWA, January 2022.
• "My husband works as a driver and earns less than two dollars a day. We mainly eat vegetables and beans because that's all we can afford. Meat and chicken have become a dream; we can't buy them because prices have increased so sharply. We no longer eat three meals a day, and sometimes I send my kids to bed without dinner." — Rihab Maajel, a 50-year-old Palestinian from Shabriha in southern Lebanon, UNRWA, January 2022.
• "I fear that I may freeze to death this winter. I cannot afford to buy gas for heating." — Nawal Kayed, 66, Palestinian in Lebanon, UNRWA, 2022.
• The group also noted that Palestinian refugees in Lebanon who want to receive medical treatment in a Lebanese hospital have to wait for weeks to obtain a permit. — palhrw.org, January 20, 2022.
• When Palestinians in Lebanon cannot feed their children this winter, chalk it up to the world's unjust lethal obsession with Israel.

Five thousand homes belonging to Palestinians in Lebanon are at risk of collapsing and are in dire need of renovation, according to a report in the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar. These are the kind of reports that Amnesty International and many human rights organizations around the world apparently choose to ignore because Israel is not involved. Pictured: Jerry-rigged electrical connections between apartment buildings in UNRWA's Borj al-Branjeh refugee camp for Palestinians in Beirut, Lebanon. (Photo by Nicolas Maeterlinck/Belga Mag/AFP via Getty Images)

Five thousand homes belonging to Palestinians in Lebanon are at risk of collapsing and are in dire need of renovation, according to a report in the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar.

These are the kind of reports that Amnesty International and many human rights organizations around the world apparently choose to ignore because Israel is not involved.

The report was published on the 25th anniversary of the Lebanese authorities' decision prohibiting the entry of construction and repair materials into Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon without a permit. The decision was issued by the Lebanese government in 1997, and the order for its implementation was referred to the Ministry of Defense because the army is responsible for granting construction permits to the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.

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