Standing in a dark alley outside her two-room home in a decaying, decrepit building in Shatilla camp in Beirut and with Yasser Arafat's poster plastered on her wall, Un Ahmad, 43, a refugee from Safad, pointed at the muddy narrow passageway that snaked through the camp littered with garbage and sewage.
"Of course I want to return to Palestine. Do you want me to continue to live in these degrading conditions? Anywhere in Palestine is better than this," she said.
Like many refugees living in squalid refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and in Gaza Strip, Um Ahmad dreams of the day she will leave the miserable life of the camp and return to Palestine. She was born in Shatilla camp and has heard about life in the West Bank from her sister who married a Palestinian West Banker and left the life of the camps to a life under occupation.
The first time I visited Gaza in 1994 and walked around the refugee camps in the city, I was shocked at the desolate conditions there.
Shatilla camp was worse than Gaza. It was raining as I walked through the mud and litter. The building complexes were so close to each other they hid the daylight. Electricity cables were hanging low from the buildings that felt they would collapse any minute. It was clear Arafat's Fatah faction was the dominant faction in the camp. Many faded posters of Arafat, some of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and several pictures of dead Fatah founders filled the camp.
Children in ragged clothes played in the mud amidst the filth and mountains of garbage.
"I'm from Palestine, but I don't know where from Palestine," said six-year-old Saleem.
"I'm from Lebanon," Najwa, 8, said.
Old men, some wearing Arafat's black and white Keffiyehs on their heads, sat in front of a small, almost empty shop gazing at nothing in particular, misery and sadness in their eyes. A sense of hoplessness overwhelmed the refugee camp Palestinian residents.
The crowded camp now is home also to Syrians who came to Lebanon for work, some Sudanese and Iraqi refugees and poor Lebanese families who could not afford housing in better parts of Beirut.
The smell of sewage and decay filled the air and sewage swamped the alleys of the camp. A building destroyed by artillery and which was once used as headquarters by the PLO's Liberation Army in 1982 was riddled with bullet holes and served as one of many reminders of the 1982 massacre.
Mar Elias refugee camp, known as the better camp, was somewhat cleaner and its houses were not as tiny or falling to pieces as those in Shatilla. The alleys in the camp were so narrow only one person at a time can walk through them. The air also smelt of sewage.
Um Youssef was an angry old woman. She was angry at the past and the present. She said she was angry because the Palestinians were divided and the leaderships of Hamas and Fatah were too busy fighting each other to think of the refugees and their right of return.
For the Israelis, the Palestinians' wish to return is a lost cause because for them it contradicts the survival of the "Jewish State."
The right of return however is a unifying collective dream for the refugees.
"Palestine is in my heart, I want to return now," said Nadia, 24.
"But for some here in the camp, some of the younger generation, the (Palestinian) cause is not their priority. They want to live and work and improve their economic conditions, this now comes first for some," she said.
"Hunger, deprivation and starvation push them to this," Abu Abed, 61, shouted from his grocery shop across the alley.
