Mr Ziad El Sayegh, Executive Director of the Civic Influence Hub in Beirut and former Policy and Communication Advisor to the Lebanese-Palestinian Dialogue Committee [a Lebanese inter-ministerial government body formed in November 2005 to implement the policies of the Lebanese government towards Palestinian refugees in Lebanon] was much more affirmative in saying that checkpoints run by militia pose the greatest threat:
“[Official checkpoints] don’t affect [Palestinians’ freedom of movement]. If you go to all the camps, you can see in the north and in the south inside and equally, and the camps are mainly connected now to the Lebanese areas and the Lebanese villages and the Lebanese-- they are connected. They are working together. They are living together. They are sharing together. The checkpoints are still there to supervise the situation of the Palestinian arms inside and outside the camps. And this is another story. This is not to do with the Palestinian refugees themselves. Now it is due to the Hezbollah intervention and not allowing the Lebanese state to put an end for these arms.[...] The Lebanese are saying these camps are out of law, and we should control these camps. And some Palestinian factions that are not aligned with PLO are saying we should keep our arms to protect ourselves because the Lebanese state is coming to kill us. The PLO declared clearly that no need for arms inside and outside the campus, and the Lebanese sovereignty should be respected. Both narratives are not true if you see the Lebanese and Palestinian now living. They are living together. This kind of polarisation is political. [...] There is a close collaboration today between the Lebanese people and the Palestinian Refugees. And there is a close collaboration, if I may say, between the Lebanese army and the Palestinian political factions. They are in close collaboration. This is where this kind of checkpoints narrative should change on both sides.
[...] [There are checkpoints run by] the Palestinian themselves within the camps [such as] Hezbollah. It’s very simple. Even if it is informal sometimes. When I say Hezbollah militia, if I may say, it is not directly only Hezbollah. Sometimes it is Ansar Allah who are Palestinian militia, but close to Hezbollah. This is how Hezbollah is dealing. who are close to the Syrian regime, close to Hezbollah. This is how Hezbollah is treating the militias inside and around the camps.”
(Source: Ziad El Sayegh, interview record, 31 October 2022)
Walaa Kayyal, a researcher living as a Palestinian in Lebanon also insisted in her interview with Asylos on mobile and volatile checkpoints in addition to fixed checkpoints at the entry of cities:
“You can find checkpoints anywhere and you also have mobile checkpoints. So for example, they would call army officers and say, «Go open a checkpoint in this area» and this can be for different reasons. Their number did not decrease. They close one and open another one. They usually do this very, very abruptly. Let me give you an example. Many people here in Lebanon don’t register their motorcycle, or they might not have a driving licence because it costs money, and they are already poor. Now on a Sunday the military decides to put a checkpoint in the middle of Beirut and start stopping all the motorcycles that are driving by, collecting the motorcycles that are not properly registered, and the government cashes the money.
[...] I am not aware of all [the checkpoints], but I can tell you that you have a checkpoint before you enter Sidon [a city in Lebanon], you have a checkpoint before you enter Tyre [a city in Lebanon], before you enter Tripoli then you have a checkpoint before you enter South of Lebanon, so you have a checkpoint actually before you enter any district where they just stop you, you show them your ID, and they say go or they ask you some questions before. Also gradually through the years, the Palestinian camps which did not have any army checkpoints, started to add checkpoints. So now if you want to enter any camp, there is an army checkpoint before you enter. They usually ask you why you’re entering. If they find you strange, they check you, they check your car, they check your documents and ask why you are entering, if you’re distributing anything, if you are carrying anything with you. Usually when we go to camps with my work, we have permission from the Lebanese government to distribute food parcels or to distribute laptops, tablets, etc.”
(Source: Walaa Kayyal, interview record, 31 October 2022)
The same source added that “Usually, the people who are arrested at checkpoints are those who don’t have IDs.” She described controls, arrests and conditions of detention as follows:
“They are arrested and they are placed in a police office until someone comes and testify that this person’s name is that, they know his mother, his father, this is the name of his mother, this is the name of his father, and this is his birth date. For stateless individuals, it is very hard because they don’t even have an identification document. They have what they call an identification card and this card is literally written by hand by the mayor of the village where the stateless person is residing. Usually, also Syrians, Palestinians from Syria, and Palestinians from Lebanon, they are stopped at checkpoints, and the army, first, they ask for ID. If you have a Syrian ID, a Palestinian from Syria or a Palestinian from Lebanon, it will show right away since the ID of Palestinians in Lebanon is very well known and visible since it is big and has a different blue colour. As I also explained to you, in Lebanon, there is a lot of discrimination, so if you show the Lebanese card, they let you pass, and if you show the Palestinian identification document, they stop you. They ask you questions such as “where do you live?” If you tell them you live in Beirut: “why are you going to the north? “ “Do you have relatives there?” “ What are you going to do?” “Are you going to have fun?” “Who are you going to visit?” So they open such a mini investigation, and if they want to arrest you, they can arrest you. They can just put you under arrest, move you to a police station, have you do some investigation, let you spend some time in the room, in the police office just doing nothing, and then at night, they tell you, we have crossed your information through our systems and there is nothing, so now you can leave to your house, simply. So the army, they have a system where they check your name. They just, for example, type your name and they see all your basic information and they see if you have any criminal record, and based on what comes out, they deal with you. If they see something in your record they will interpret it as related to your current travel and say «Oh, so you’re going there to steal”, they can decide to keep you longer or even to transfer you to a closer police station. And all of this, if I may say, depends on the army staff or those who are at the checkpoint. If they are in a good mood, and they love Palestinians (because in a lot of Lebanese families they are Palestinians), if their mother is Palestinian or – I don’t know – their brother-in-law is, if they have this Lebanese-Palestinian relationship, this might be a very good excuse to let you go at checkpoints. So this process is very much subjective.”
(Source: Walaa Kayyal, interview record, 31 October 2022)
Katherine Harbord, a lecturer in human rights specialised in the Middle East whom we interviewed for this report in October 2022 shared her knowledge on checkpoints specifically in the North of Lebanon:
“So I have a very little bit of information, but this relates to checkpoints in the north, near to the camps near Tripoli. What I have been told by stateless Palestinian asylum seekers from Lebanon is that Lebanese armed forces checkpoints or Lebanese police checkpoints are not much of a problem any more, problems rather come from militia, Hezbollah and others. It was certainly my interlocutors’ understanding that they felt that Palestinians, those with Lebanese registration or Palestinians from Syria, were disproportionately being detained at checkpoints and sometimes stripped of their freedom of movement, sometimes detained. Generally speaking, my understanding is that they will be arrested or detained the first time and usually either given a warning, sort of, «We don’t want your sort here, or you can’t pass through here.» And if they persist, then they might be sort of roughed up a little bit, slapped or beaten. This was corroborated by three individuals that I’ve spoken to separately about this in the last few years. As I say, they were all connected with the Tripoli region. But I heard similar stories from each of them, which led me to kind of conclude that there probably is some consistency. In one case, the man that was detained was beaten quite badly, and this was because he was a Sunni man who was married to a Shia woman and it was a Shia militia that detained him. So the problem, in that case, was not his Palestinian identity if you like, but rather a sectarian question. All of them felt they were being discriminated against because they were Palestinians, but there may also be other elements to it. I’ve heard of one person who was arrested but this is going back about five or six years. He was arrested by the police. He was a non-ID man. He was ostensibly arrested because of his lack of ID and kind of suspicion of illegal status or something like that. He was removed to a detention centre, not exactly prison. He reported ill-treatment. And his family was able to secure his release through payment of a bribe. And again, he felt that his status as a non-ID Palestinian was behind this and that his arrest was an opportunity for a bribe. Certainly anecdotally based on the numbers of persons I talked to on this matter, but Syrian Palestinians perceived that they experience more discrimination than other Palestinian groups and receive more verbal abuse and sort of racist “behaviour.” There’s a lot of prejudice against them. There’s obviously a lot of prejudice against stateless Palestinians, full stop, especially in Lebanon. But this is kind of magnified for the Syrian Palestinians.
[...] So my understanding with the militias was that they detain people either at the checkpoint or at a quasi-military base. With the police, the man who was detained was taken first to a local police station and later to a detention centre in Beirut.”
(Source: Katherine Harbord, interview record, 13 October 2022)
The Jordanian political economist and long-time commentator on the Israeli-Palestinian dialogue Riad Al Khouri who was interviewed for this report in October 2022 considered that checkpoints “may have been a problem in the past but are no longer a major problem”:
“Now, to clarify, we are talking about two distinct kinds of checkpoints here. One would be an official checkpoint of the Lebanese army or the Lebanese police. And there are few problems or restrictions in this regard, including arbitrary arrest. I do not think this is a real problem. The other checkpoints are informal. Lebanon is full of militias. These are not government bodies, they are private. They may, in a certain area, be representative of people. In other words, they are not just criminal gangs, they are somehow politically or socially based, and they may from time to time have checkpoints. But again, talking about the present, this is not a major problem. It was a major problem in the past going back to the 1970s in ‘80s, it would be possible to hold people or even imprison or even kill at these checkpoints, including Palestinian refugees. But this was 40 years ago. We are talking about the present. This is no longer a major problem.”
(Source: Riad Al Khouri, interview record, 7 October 2022)
In a series of written responses to questions sent by Asylos for this report, Dr. Jasmin Lilian Diab, Director of the Institute for Migration Studies at the Lebanese American University indicated in October 2022 that:
“Stateless Palestinians remain at risk of detention or arrest if they reach a checkpoint and do not have documentation. This is why a significant number of them opt out of moving from region to region entirely. Many stateless Palestinians avoid checkpoints entirely, and remain in the camps/informal tented settlements where they are located. Presently, though they are detained/arrested for not having documentation, the Internal Security Forces (ISF) has been known to release them after paying a fine.
There are several main checkpoints across the country that do not move, such as those located in the North and South of the country, and ones before and after specific areas around the Beirut airport. These checkpoints are permanent (largely) and are on the radar of refugees, stateless persons and other people who wish to avoid them. The issue is with ad hoc checkpoints that are set up following political tension/a political event, or in the case where there is a perceived security threat, or the army/police is looking for a specific profile of people. In many cases, this is where the arrests happen (i.e. when the checkpoint is not routinely located there).”
(Source: Dr. Jasmin Lilian Diab, written communication with Asylos, 6 October 2022)
The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a report on Palestinians in Lebanon in January 2021 which stated that: “5.1 Domestic
[…] A source indicates that Palestinians who have the right papers also face discrimination and risk being unjustly arrested at checkpoints. The probability of this varies by situation and depends on the militia guarding the checkpoint. Checks are carried out randomly, but one source indicates that people based on their skin colour or appearance, who may be associated with Palestinian and Syrian refugees, are more likely subject to questioning and possible discriminatory treatment at checkpoints.” (In-house translation. The translator is a native Dutch speaker)
ORIGINAL SOURCE
“5.1 Binnenland
[…] Een bron geeft aan dat ook Palestijnen die over de juiste papieren beschikken te maken hebben met discriminatie en kans hebben onterecht opgepakt te worden bij controleposten. De kans hierop verschilt per situatie en hangt af van de militie die de controlepost bewaakt. Controles worden willekeurig uitgevoerd, maar een bron geeft aan dat personen op basis van hun huidskleur of uiterlijk, die mogelijk geassocieerd worden met Palestijnse en Syrische vluchtelingen, meer kans op ondervraging en mogelijke discriminatoire behandeling ondervinden bij controleposten.”
(Source: Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Thematisch ambtsbericht Palestijnen in Libanon”, January 2021, pp. 27-28)
Based on a Whatsapp survey in Palestinian camps and gatherings in Lebanon, the UNDP stated in August 2020 that: “Mieh Mieh Palestine refugee camp vs. Mieh Mieh village
[...] Entry and exit restrictions for people and goods in the camp is a persistent inconvenience. Indeed, one young person exclaimed that ‘the number of checkpoints add a lot of stress on people who live in the camp, sometimes you have to get out an hour earlier to make sure you are not late because of the checkpoints’. Many FGD [focus group discussion] participants also claimed that what can or cannot be brought into the camp depends on the mood of the soldiers monitoring these checkpoints: one man told us they ‘spend hours at checkpoints, to explain the entry of necessities. [The guards] require permits to enter food and basic equipment, such as heaters in the winter, gas tanks, water, a TV. I don’t understand why all this, especially after the withdrawal of weapons!’ Another said that ‘they stop sick people at checkpoints, and even when we give them proof that they are sick or dying, they insist on IDs, even dead people need permits to pass’. Regarding this last point, we found that these delays often meant that some people did not make it to the hospital alive. A young woman in our FGD became emotional as she spoke of the tragic death of her father: ‘my father had a heart attack in the middle of the night and due to the lack of any medical facilities in the camp, we tried to take him to a hospital outside, but they made it hard on us at the checkpoints and he died on the way’.”
(Source: UNDP, “Nothing and Everything to Lose: Results from a Qualitative Whatsapp survey of Palestinian Camps and Gatherings in Lebanon”, August 2020, p. 27)