[7] In 1932, the French colonial authorities offered a piece of land of some 30,000 square meters in Al-Buss to the Jabal Amel Ulama Society of Shia clerics and feudal landlords to construct a school there.

However, such plans were not realised due to internal divisions of the local power players and a few years later the French rulers attributed the swampy area to survivors of the Armenian Genocide,[8] who had started arriving in Tyre already in the early 1920s,[9] mostly by boat.

The defunct chapel is nowadays part of an UNRWA school building, while the church of Saint Paul belongs to the Maronite Catholic Archeparchy of Tyre and is still in service.

[3] In 1957, large-scale excavations of the Roman-Byzantine necropolis in Al-Buss started under the leadership of Emir Maurice Chéhab (1904–1994), "the father of modern Lebanese archaeology" who for decades headed the Antiquities Service in Lebanon and was the curator of the National Museum of Beirut.

[11] As Tyre greatly expanded during the 1960s due to an increasing a rural-to-urban movement and many new buildings were constructed on the isthmus of the peninsula,[2] Al-Buss became physically more integrated into the city.

The Palestinian insurgency in South Lebanon escalated further after the conflict of Black September 1970 between the Jordanian Armed Forces (JAF) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

[1] The 1973 October Yom Kippur War signalled even more Palestinian military operations from Southern Lebanese territory, including Tyre, which in turn increasingly sparked Israeli retaliation.

[23] Military training and weaponry for its fighters was initially provided by Arafat's PLO-faction Fatah, but Sadr increasingly distanced himself from them as the situation escalated into a civil war:[24] In January 1975, a unit of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) attacked the Tyre barracks of the Lebanese Army.

In response, Israeli forces invaded Lebanon on the night of 14/15 March, and in a few days occupied the entire southern part of the country except for the city of Tyre and its surrounding area.

[11] "On 15 March 1978, the Lebanese Government submitted a strong protest to the Security Council against the Israeli invasion, stating that it had no connection with the Palestinian commando operation.

[34] The PLO reportedly converted itself into a regular army by purchasing large weapon systems, including Soviet WWII-era T-34 tanks, which it deployed in the "Tyre Pocket" with an estimated 1,500 fighters.

[24] It was reportedly assisted by the Progressive Socialist Party of Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, whose father Kamal had entered into and then broken an alliance with Amal-founder Musa Sadr, as well as by the pro-Syrian Palestinian militia As-Saiqa and the "Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command".

"[45] At the same time, many Lebanese Shiite families who were displaced from the Israeli-occupied southern "security zone" started building an informal neighbourhood on the Western side next to the camp.

[47] Following the end of the war in March 1991 based on the Taif Agreement, units of the Lebanese Army deployed along the coastal highway and around the Palestinian refugee camps of Tyre, including Al-Buss.

The patterns of emigration changed through the 1990s, as European border regimes further tightened: "The geographical extension of the migratory field widened and touched countries such as the United Kingdom and Belgium.

[6] During Israel's invasion in the July 2006 Lebanon War, Al-Buss was apparently less affected than other parts of Tyre, especially compared to the badly hit Burj ash-Shamali.

[50] This may have been the area of the Maronite Saint Paul's church on the Eastern edge of the camp since a commemorative plaque there notes that the religious building was damaged by Israeli air strikes on 12 July and later rebuilt with funding from the Emir of Qatar.

When the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr El Bared in northwestern Lebanon was largely destroyed in 2007 because of heavy fighting between the Lebanese Army and the militant Sunni Islamist group Fatah al-Islam, some of its residents fled to Al-Buss.

[51] A study by the German leftwing Rosa Luxemburg Foundation found that while Fatah is the leading faction in the camp and thus dominates the ruling Popular Committee, a host of other parties have supporters there as well, both secular and religious ones.

As of June 2018, there were 12,281 registered refugees in the Al-Buss camp, though this does not necessarily represent the actual number as many have left over the years,[15] Northern Europe,[29] and UNRWA does not track them.

[1] According to a 2016 study by UN HABITAT, residents of Al-Buss mainly work in construction and other technical jobs, particularly in the metal workshops along its Northern side,[2] though many of them are apparently owned by Lebanese.

[12] In addition, many men work as day labourers in seasonal agriculture, mainly in the citrus plantations of the Greater Tyre plains area.

"[1]The French anthropologist Sylvain Perdigon – who lived in the Al-Buss camp in 2006/2007 and has been a lecturer at the American University of Beirut (AUB) since 2013 – found through his fieldwork that these precarious labor conditions make emigration the only "thinkable, desirable route" away from a dead-end future for many residents.

[3][56] In August 2019, the 17-year-old Ismail Ajjawi – a Palestinian graduate of the UNRWA Deir Yassin High School in Al-Buss[57] – made global headlines when he scored top-results to earn a scholarship to study at Harvard, but was deported upon arrival in Boston despite valid visa.

Also omnipresent in the public sphere of the camp are images of the late PLO leader Arafat and of Palestinian fighters killed in the armed resistance against the occupation as martyrs, usually combined with pictures of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

Other common themes dealing with Palestinian identity are spray-painted images depicting narratives about the traumatic displacement events of the Nakba and life in the diaspora.

Some feature Handala, the iconic symbol of Palestinian defiance created by cartoonist Naji al-Ali, who worked as a drawing instructor at Tyre's Jafariya School during the 1960s.

Perdigon has researched another kind of a cultural phenomenon that he describes as "fairly ordinary" amongst many Palestinians in Lebanon, especially in Al-Buss and Rashidieh, which happens to be an ancient burial site as well.

Were it not for her vigilance at the time, Lamis 'would not have lived' (gheyro ma be’ish), although the price to pay was that she 'carried' al-Qreene from her mother (ijat menha iley .

In the very last instance in the early 1990s, al-Qreene came (ijat) in the shape of Lamis’s very own husband, who had died a few weeks before at the age of 37 from nervous exhaustion (an account confirmed by the neighborhood consensus) upon repeatedly finding himself unable to sustain his family in the context of laws and decrees excluding Palestinians from legal employment.