Balata Refugee Camp

Balata Refugee Camp is one of the refugee camps that were established by the UNRWA after the war of 1948, when the Palestinians fled from their lands (the lands that are currently called Israel like: Yafa, Haifa and al-Lud). The UNRWA provided them with tents and food portions then. After few years, the UNRWA started building rooms for the families instead of tents.

In the 50s, people started paying attention to various social aspects of their lives. They started establishing educational and health institutes to improve the circumstances they were living in.

Nowadays, Balata Refugee Camp suffers the continuous attacks by the Israeli army. Destruction, and violations of human rights by the Israeli army are daily events that have affected people’s lives socially, psychologically, economically, intellectually and educationally, especially kids.

Schools became crowded, school children lost concentration on their study. Schools started giving two shifts of classes: morning and evening; as a result of the continuously increasing population in the camp. That causes troubles for students and parents at the same time.

Those are some of the problems that the refugees in the camp face on daily basis. They are trying so hard to find solutions for them to be able to improve their life and think about other aspects of life.

It might not be fair to write pages about a one kilometer square land that has a population of over 20,000 inhabitants. This camp with this huge population is counted as the biggest refugee camp in the West Bank. It also might not be easy to write less than that and say all what can be said about our camp.