[1] The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has the mandate to provide basic services, assisted by local and international NGOs.

[2] Burj el-Shamali – also transliterated into the spellings of "Borj" or "Bourj" combined with a version of "Shimali", "Shamali", "Shemâly", "Chemali", "Chamali", or "Chmali" with or without the article "el", "al", "ech", "esh", or "ash" – is commonly translated as "Northern Tower", as done by E. H. Palmer in the 1881 Survey of Western Palestine (SWP).

[8]The only exception is one neighborhood which is known as Morocco, referring to the North African origin of the residents, whose ancestors moved to historic Palestine during the Ottoman Empire.

[8] According to Ali Badawi, the long-time chief-archaeologist for Southern Lebanon at the Directorate-General of Antiquities, it can be generally assumed that all villages around Tyre were established already during prehistoric times like the neolithic age (5.000 BCE).

[12] If there were settlements during that time, they were probably demolished by the army of Alexander the Great, who had all the coastal villages destroyed and the building materials used to connect the island of Tyre with a mole during the siege of 332 BCE.

[4] It is not clear whether Burj el-Shemali continued to be settled and/or used as a funerary place after the Arab armies defeated the Byzantine empire in the region and took over Tyre in 635 CE for half a millennium of Islamic rule.

When the Ottoman leadership at the Sublime Porte appointed the Druze leader Fakhreddine II of the Maan family to administer the area at the beginning of the 17th century, the Emir encouraged many Metwali – the discriminated Shia Muslims of what is now Lebanon – to settle to the East of Tyre to secure the road to Damascus.

[16]Little has been recorded about developments in Burj el-Shemali after the French rulers proclaimed the new State of Greater Lebanon on the first of September 1920: In 1937, a richly decorated Roman tomb with frescoes from the 2nd century CE was accidentally discovered there in an ancient necropolis area.

The border with British-ruled Mandatory Palestine was still open during those times, and many Palestinian Jews used to spend holidays in Tyre, while vice versa many Southern Lebanese would travel freely to Haifa and Tel Aviv.

There were plenty of vegetables and fruits, apricots, peach trees, plums, grapes, cherries (quite rare in the region), really big and sweet watermelons and honeydew melons.

[8] At that time UNRWA started providing humanitarian assistance – infrastructure services (water, sewage, electricity, road networks and shelter), school education and health care – to the residents of the camp.

[23][24] Meanwhile, more Palestinian refugees settled in the area of Maachouk – 1 km to the West of Burj El Shemali – on agricultural lands owned by the Lebanese State as a neighbourhood rather than a camp.

The Tyrian public expressed solidarity with the Palestinian cause in that early post-independence era, especially thanks to the politics of Tyre's long-time Imam and social-reformer Abdulhussein Sharafeddin, who had given shelter to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini shortly after the beginning of the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine.

[27] Reportedly, one of the first directors of the institute was a Maronite, while its Iraq-born Shiite principal started military trainings for Shia youth with support from Palestinian fighters at the camp.

[29] At the same time, during the course of the decade, Greater Tyre metropolitan area, including Burj el-Shemali, increasingly became subject to a rural-to-urban movement that has been ongoing ever since and resulted in growing settlements around the camp.

[30] However, this sentiment changed during the first half of the 1970s when the local population got increasingly caught up in the crossfire between the Palestinian insurgency in South Lebanon and reprisals from Israel's counter-insurgency.

[33] The Iranian director of Sadr's technical school, Mostafa Chamran, who was married to Amal activist Ghada Ja'bar,[14] became a major instructor of guerilla warfare.

[34] Military training and weaponry for Amal fighters was still mainly provided by Palestinian militants, but Sadr increasingly distanced himself from them as the situation escalated into a civil war: In January 1975, a unit of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) attacked the Tyre barracks of the Lebanese Army.

[44] The PLO, on the other side, reportedly converted itself into a quasi-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.

[43] The heaviest such incident took place in April 1982, when the PLO (Fateh) bombarded Amal's technical training institute in Burj el-Shemali for ten hours.

[47] Following an assassination attempt on Israeli ambassador Shlomo Argov in London, the IDF on 6 June 1982 launched what they called Operation Peace for Galilee and once again invaded Lebanon.

[54] After one month, Amal attacked Rashidieh,[47] reportedly assisted by its allies from the Progressive Socialist Party, As-Saiqa and "Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command".

The conflict ended with the withdrawal of Palestinian forces loyal to PLO leader Yasser Arafat from Beirut and their redeployment to the camps in Southern Lebanon.

The one in Burj el-Shemali likewise continued to be controlled by Arafat's Fatah party and loyalist contingents of other PLO factions, though some forces opposed to them - including Islamists - kept a presence and representation there as well.

[14] After the end of Lebanon's devastating civil war through the Taif Agreement in 1990, units of the Lebanese Army deployed along the coastal highway and around the Palestinian refugee camps of Tyre, including Burj ash-Shemali.

Nearby apartments in the village are inhabited by the Palestinian middle class: doctors, nurses, teachers, and administrators who can afford higher quality housing but want to remain close to their community and relief services like healthcare and education.

For instance, in 2017 at least, one member of the municipal council was a naturalised Palestinian from Burj el Shemali camp,[65] as he probably originated from one of the seven predominantly Shi'ite villages in Palestine (see above).

[7] With further regard to blurred lines between spaces and (self-)affiliations it is noteworthy that there are also many poor Lebanese who have moved into Palestinian camps[67] since rents are relatively cheap there.

[19]However, the second, third and fourth generation refugees have lost the subsistence agricultural existences of their ancestors from Palestine due to the very limited space and denial of land-ownership.

These demanded patients to pay for a minor part of their hospital expenses and also ended coverage for Palestinians with Lebanese nationality or dual citizenship.