This page is subject to the extended confirmed restriction related to the Arab-Israeli conflict.Rashidieh, or Ar-Rashidiyah[a] is the second most populous Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, located on the Mediterranean coast about five kilometres south of the city of Tyre (Sur).

[1] The camps's Arabic name, "الرشيدية", is variously transliterated as Rashidiya, Rashidiyah, Rachidiye, Rashidiyyeh, Rashadiya, Rashidieh, Reshîdîyeh, or Rusheidiyeh with or without a version of the article Al, El, Ar, or Er.

The London-based Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) and other sources recorded that in the Mid-19th century the settlement was named after its then owner, the Ottoman top-diplomat and politician Mustafa Reşid Pasha, known best as the chief architect behind the regime's modernization reforms known as Tanzimat.

[6] 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 of the neolithic age (5,000 BCE), especially in the fertile area of Ras al-Ain, next to the Tell El-Rashdiyeh (the Hill of Rashidieh).

This isthmus increased greatly in width over the centuries because of extensive silt depositions on either side, making the former island a permanent peninsula – based on the ruins and rubble of Palaetyrus.

The city remained under Byzantine control until it was captured by the Sassanian shah Khosrow II at the turn from the 6th to the 7th century CE, and then briefly regained until the Muslim conquest of the Levant, when in 640 it was taken by the Arab forces of the Rashidun Caliphate.

[13] Under its new rulers, Tyre and its countryside – including what is now Rashidieh – were divided into three parts in accordance with the Pactum Warmundi: two-thirds to the royal domain of Baldwin and one third as autonomous trading colonies for the Italian merchant cities of Genoa, Pisa and – mainly to the Doge of Venice.

[7] The Ottoman Empire conquered the Levant in 1516, yet the desolate area of Tyre remained untouched for another ninety years until the beginning of the 17th century, when the leadership at the Sublime Porte appointed the Druze leader Fakhreddine II as Emir to administer Jabal Amel (modern-day South Lebanon).

While Frumentius has been credited with bringing Christianity to the Kingdom of Aksum and became the first bishop of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, Edesius returned to Tyre to become a priest.It was then in 1856, according to some sources, that Mustafa Reşid Pasha – the chief architect behind the Ottoman government reforms known as Tanzimat – obtained personal ownership of the lands in the area of Tell Habish.

The army of the rebellious Egyptian Governor was defeated not only with allied support from the British Empire and Austria-Hungary, but mainly by Shiite forces under the leadership of the Ali al-Saghir dynasty.

The PEF Survey of Western Palestine (SWP) – led by Herbert Kitchener at the beginning of his military career – explored the area in May 1878 and described Er Rusheidiyeh as follows:"It is a hill about sixty feet above the level of the sea.

"[2]According to the Bavarian historian and politician Johann Nepomuk Sepp, who in 1874 led an Imperial German mission to Tyre in search of the bones of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I "Barbarossa", the estate was taken over after the death of Reşid Pasha in 1858 by Sultan Abdulaziz.

[3] In 1903, the Greek archaeologist Theodore Makridi Bey, curator of the Imperial Museum at Constantinople conducted archaeological excavations in Rashidieh and discovered a number of cinerary urns with human bones and ashes.

[29] In 1942, Emir Maurice Chehab (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 – conducted further excavations in Rashidieh and discovered more cinerary urns from Phoenician times.

[30]"In 1950, a couple of years after arriving in south Lebanon, the Lebanese authorities decided to relocate all Palestinians residing in southern towns (e.g., Tibnine, al-Mansouri, al-Qlayla, and Bint Jbeil) to designated refugee camps.

"[21]In 1970, the camp received more Palestinian refugees, this time from Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan following the Black September conflict between Jordanian Armed Forces (JAF) under King Hussein and the PLO led by Yasser Arafat.

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.

"[40]Tyre was badly affected in the fighting during the Operation Litani, with civilians bearing the brunt of the war, both in human lives and economically:[17] The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) targeted especially the harbour on claims that the PLO received arms from there and the Palestinian refugee camps.

[42][43] The PLO, on the other side, 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.

[32] The volunteer nurse Françoise Kesteman, who was a member of the French Communist Party, recounted as exemplary the death of a young Palestinian mother:"When Mouna left the bomb shelter to fetch food for the children, Israeli bombers ripped apart her small slender body.

[32] Subsequently, the Christian Science Monitor estimated that about sixty percent of the camp were destroyed with some 5,000 refugees living in the ruins:"Israeli soldiers dynamited air raid shelters built by the Palestine Liberation Organization.

[53]"The priority of Amal remained to prevent the return of any armed Palestinian presence to the South, primarily because this might provoke renewed Israeli intervention in recently evacuated areas.

[53] It was reportedly assisted by the Progressive Socialist Party of Druze leader Walid Jumblatt as well as by the pro-Syrian Palestinian militias of As-Saiqa and the "Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command".

The one in Rashidieh likewise continued to be the "main stronghold" of 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.

[60] In February 1988, "Amal seemed to lose control" when US-Colonel William R. Higgins, who served in a senior position of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), was kidnapped on the coastal highway to Naqoura close to Rashidieh by armed men suspected of being affiliated with Hezbollah.

[62] 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.

[71] Almost half of those residents of Rashidieh who are in work do low-paid seasonal or occasional jobs on construction sites or as agricultural labourers in the banana, lime and orange orchards of the region.

[75] Perdigon lays out one exemplary case of this phenomenon – which is known as Al Qreene – from Rashidieh:"I heard Abu Ali tell of a still fresh encounter with al-Qreene during a visit in 2014 to relatives in a Beirut flat.

A few months before, in his mid-forties, Abu Ali had started to have dreams of being stuck by himself in his own, emptied camp house with a cat walking in circles and mewing plaintively.

The dream returned for weeks on end and what was only irksome, even a bit funny, at first gradually turned into a liability as Abu Ali found himself perpetually tired, unfocused, and less and less capable of holding his guard duty properly.