Beirut, Lebanon — Osama Najjar is a Palestinian refugee living in the Beddawi refugee camp in Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-largest city, where he used to have a shop selling aluminium. Palestinians are barred from working in specific professions in Lebanon, including medicine, law, engineering and pharmacy, meaning that owning a shop is a crucial economic lifeline for many, regardless of their education levels. But Najjar, like other Palestinians in Lebanon, says the situation has grown increasingly difficult, as rising inflation and energy costs hit one of Lebanon’s most vulnerable communities particularly hard.
With business stuttering and unable to keep up with his bills, he was forced to close his shop in early 2024. Since then, he has found work hard to come by. Palestinians first became refugees in Lebanon during the 1948 Nakba, when Zionist forces established the state of Israel.
In the process, they destroyed more than 500 Palestinian towns, killed about 13,000 Palestinians, and turned 750,000 more into refugees who fled to camps in the occupied West Bank and neighbouring countries. Of those, about 100,000 people went north to Lebanon, many of them promising themselves that they would return home one day. Many slept in informal settlements and tents at first, but as the years passed and hopes of an immediate return to their hometowns and villages faded, tents gave way to informal and often unregulated concrete structures.
In 1964, Lebanon passed a decree on foreign workers that required non-Lebanese nationals to obtain work permits. During the country’s civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990, a wide range of Palestinian political groups took part in the fighting. This legacy left behind ill will towards Palestinians from some segments of the Lebanese population.
In 2010, amendments were made to the Lebanese labour law that reduced certain permit fees and eased other restrictions for Palestinian labourers, but experts say implementation was limited. In 2021, the Ministry of Labour issued a decree that was supposed to ease restrictions on some professions, which led to political backlash. In February 2026, the Lebanese government introduced an administrative mechanism that allows Palestinian nursing students to apply for employment sponsorship.
However, experts say many of these legal changes do not alter the structural exclusion of Palestinians from the Lebanese labour force. Today, UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, recognises 12 Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. According to its Lebanon office, about 222,000 Palestinians resided in the country as of February 2025.
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