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A Lebanese MP warned Monday of Israeli and US plans to naturalize Palestinian refugees, urging locals not to emigrate or sell land, Lebanese media reported.
Free Patriotic Movement leader Michel Aoun told Zahle residents during a three-day tour that "This is an issue that we reject, and we will not be subject to any foreign policy planning to execute certain plans," the Daily Star quoted him as saying.
Aoun said the US was not interested in assuring the security, stability and sovereignty of Lebanon, but rather in solving the Palestinian problem at the expense of the Lebanese.
The MP visited a number of Zahle’s dioceses and religious figures after which he chaired a seminar in one of the schools that was attended by some of Zahle’s youth, the daily reported.
“You will face a class of politicians with treason as their main objective,” he told the attendees, and urged Zahle residents not to sell their land, emigrate, or allow the "plan" to naturalize Palestinians in Lebanon to succeed.
The FPM leader stressed that naturalizing Palestinians was a “real” rather than a “theoretical conspiracy that has started in 1948.”
In June, the Progressive Socialist Party and the Syrian Social National Party forwarded a draft law to the Lebanese parliament granting Palestinians in Lebanon access to property ownership, social security benefits, and various professions.
Voting on the draft legislation is due on 17 August, after the process was postponed twice in a bid to achieve consensus.
Approximately 425,000 refugees are registered with UNRWA in Lebanon, with many living in the country’s 12 refugee camps. According to UNRWA, the UN body set up to assist Palestinian refugees, in 2005, officially registered Palestine refugees born in Lebanon were allowed by law to work in the clerical and administrative sectors for the first time.
However, refugees remain unable to work in some professions, for example, as doctors, dentists, lawyers, engineers, or accountants.
Shortly after the bill was proposed, PLO representative to Lebanon Abdallah Abdallah said there was no intent for Palestinians to ask for political rights or access to state social services. “What the Palestinians want is the right to work like any other foreign nationals,” he said at the time.
In February, Fatah's secretary-general in Lebanon, Sultan Abul Enayn, publicly confirmed his resignation from his post over a failure of the Palestinian leadership to heed his warnings of increasingly grim circumstances faced by refugees. |
