The liberal Arabic media network based in Beirut Raseef22 published an English translation of an article containing a testimony by a Palestinian speaking about discretionary interpretations of his identity documents:
“Al-Ayyi indicates that “the suffering of a Palestinian begins with the absence of his ‘legal personality’ in Lebanon. The authorities recognize him as a refugee, but he lacks his personality and identity when it comes to laws and when brought before the judiciary. Here, we discover the discretion when dealing with him, as sometimes he is treated as a foreigner, sometimes as a stateless person, and sometimes as an Arab citizen. As such, there isn’t any interaction where rights and duties are actually made clear, so he is deprived of his basic human rights, and this would result in the refugee losing the feeling of belonging to Lebanon and acquiring a feeling of permanent apprehension of the future, as no justice is achieved for him. In short, he lives on the margins of the law because his presence is not linked to legal legislation.”
(Source: Raseef22, “A fourth generation of Palestinians living in Lebanon “on the fringes of the law”, 6 December 2021)
Susan M Akram, a Clinical Professor at Boston University School of Law, wrote in her 2018 journal article titled «The Search for Protection for Stateless Refugees in the Middle East: Palestinians and Kurds in Lebanon and Jordan32 that:
“The difficulty in defining Palestinian and Kurdish as stateless refugees is the first hurdle to identifying solutions in Jordan and Lebanon, two states that have steadfastly rejected the definitions of ‘stateless person’ and ‘refugee’ in the relevant international instruments.”
(Source: Susan Akram: “The Search for Protection for Stateless Refugees in the Middle East: Palestinians and Kurds in Lebanon and Jordan”. December 2018, p. 11)
In an academic chapter on family dispersion among Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Syria published in 2021, geographer Dr. Kamel Doraï wrote that:
[...] The refugee status of Palestinians is linked to their country of residence. When they leave their country of residence, they do not fall under the mandate of the UNHCR and can only access limited humanitarian assistance provided by the UNRWA. Conflict tends to transform Palestinian refugees into asylum-seekers, and most of the time they are seen as illegal migrants in their country of temporary residence. As they are stateless, they cannot even seek the protection of their country of origin. The singularity of the Palestinian experience is related to the non-resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, to their stateless status, and their exclusion from the 1951 conventional asylum system.”
(Source: Kamel Doraï, “From Family Dispersion to Asylum-Seeking: Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon and Syria”, 2021, p. 57)
In its series of country reports for 2021, the US Department of State wrote about Lebanon in 2022:
“Access to Asylum: The law does not provide for the granting of asylum or refugee status. Nonetheless, the country hosted an estimated 1.5 million refugees, the vast majority of them Syrian.”
(Source: US Department of State (USDOS) “2021 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Lebanon”, Section 2. Respect for Civil Liberties, March 2022, p. 24)
32 Even though this information is not within the research period, it was included since it is pertinent to the lack of status of Palestinians as stateless in the Lebanese law.