By Zoe Reynolds, Independent Photographer/Reporter
“Rusul is crying,” says Abeer. “My daughter is afraid of going to school because the bombing was next door. We can still hear low-altitude Israeli drones overhead.”
Abeer Al Saleh works full-time in an Australian-supported preschool for Palestinian and Syrian refugees in Beirut, Lebanon, while also completing her tertiary studies. Many UNICEF-funded centres in the camps are set to close, leaving teachers unemployed after Trump cut aid to the United Nations agencies.
A UN report released in May found that 47% of women’s organisations may shut down within six months due to global aid funding cuts. The Union Aid Abroad–APHEDA project continues.
Abeer’s daughter, seven-year-old Rusul, was born into the Burj el-Barajneh Palestinian refugee camp in southern Beirut, a great-grandchild of the first Nakba of 1948. This was Israel’s first brutal expulsion, forcing an estimated 750,000 people from Palestine and killing another 10,000 to create the state of Israel.
“My grandmother and her family were forced off their land,” Abeer recalls. “She was not even five years old but remembered how her father put her on the back of a camel and covered her mouth so that she couldn’t make a sound and the Israelis wouldn’t kill them all.”
Abeer’s grandmother died without ever fulfilling her wish to return to her village, but Abeer says the Palestinians of the camp still live in hope that they will one day return to their homeland.
Seventy-seven years on the Nakba—its killings and expulsions—continues with renewed ferocity. Since October 2023, Israelis have been displacing 2.2 million Palestinians and killing an estimated 60,000 in Gaza, another 1,000 on the West Bank.
Palestinian refugees worldwide are still denied the right of return. Nor do the 220,000 Palestinian refugees in the camps in Lebanon have citizenship, the right to vote, access to health care, or unemployment benefits.
Abeer and her daughter live with her family, just two blocks from where Israeli fighter jets recently dropped a made-in-the-USA bunker buster bomb. It was not the only building within walking distance from her home to take a hit.
The camp itself is a maze of dark alleyways beneath a jungle of plastic tubing carrying both water and electricity to a 300-metre by 250-metre block housing 40,000 people.
Children play in narrow alleys they share with men on motorbikes, pedestrians, makeshift food stalls, and corner shops. Posters of Resistance leaders and martyrs line the walls. There are no playgrounds, no parks, no trees, no lawns and little sunlight.
Union Aid Abroad–APHEDA has been raising union and government funding for the Palestinian Women’s Health Organisation (PWHO) since it was founded in 1993 by Dr Olfat Mahmoud, a close friend to APHEDA co-founder Helen McCue. Olfat died last year, but her portrait has pride of place on every office wall.
PWHO is an organisation, established and run by refugee women, whose purpose is to organise and advocate for the rights of refugees, women, children and people with disabilities. Today, APHEDA continues to support refugees like Abeer’s family by providing early education in numeracy and literacy (in Arabic and English) for nearly 100 children so their mothers can work.
PWHO offers classes for children with disabilities, primary school retention classes, sports, and peer education for women’s rights issues like domestic violence. The project is funded by the Australian Education Union and the Australian Government, through the Australian NGO Cooperation Program.
“The educational classes are designed to support children as they prepare to join elementary schools, without fear or difficulty in the future,” says Nadine Hamade, PWHO Executive Director. “Additionally, we aim to enhance services for working women by providing a safe and welcoming centre where they can meet their families’ basic daily needs.
“The centre also strives to preserve Palestinian identity in exile through culture, arts and storytelling,” she says. “(It is) a way of expressing both identity and the deep anger over the loss of homeland.”
To maintain the classes during Israeli bombardments, PWHO has an emergency Plan B, including working online and in person taking into consideration the safety and security of all staff and children enrolled in the centres.