The Diaspora
Lebanon keeps 39 syndicate professions closed to Palestinian refugees
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Palestinian refugees in Lebanon remain excluded from the professions regulated by Lebanon's syndicates — law, medicine, engineering and dozens more — nearly five years after a labour ministry decree was presented as ending their exclusion from the workforce.
The count of closed professions is 39, according to the report of the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, which found the exclusion "may be seen as prima facie discriminatory" and said that national preference rules combined with the work permit requirement make a decent formal job practically impossible for a Palestinian refugee.
The single documented change since 2024 is narrow. In February 2026 Lebanese authorities introduced a measure allowing registered Palestinian nursing graduates to apply for annual authorisations, subject to employer sponsorship and proof that no Lebanese candidate is available, according to the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, which reported in April that skills programmes offer limited relief without structural reform.
The barrier is the reciprocity clause.
Lebanon's 2010 labour and social security amendments left the ban on the liberal professions intact because they did not remove the requirement of reciprocal treatment — a condition Palestinians cannot meet in the absence of a Palestinian state that grants the same to Lebanese nationals, as the Palestinian rights organisation Badil set out in its analysis of the amendments.
On social security, the Lebanese Parliament's own summary records that reciprocity was waived only for the end-of-service indemnity branch, not for the sickness, maternity or family allowance branches, into which Palestinian workers pay.
The December 2021 decree by then labour minister Mustafa Bayram opened managerial, commercial, tourism, industrial, health, education and service work to Palestinians born in Lebanon and registered with the interior ministry, L'Orient Today reported at the time. Arab News reported the same week that the decree explicitly barred them from state security services and from the free-profession syndicates, and that it drew condemnation from major Lebanese parties warning of naturalisation.
Property is closed on the same logic. Since the adoption of Law 296/2001, which bars ownership by anyone without citizenship of a recognised state, Palestine refugees have been prevented from legally acquiring and transferring immovable property, according to material compiled in the Asylos legal database from UN sources.
How many people this affects is itself contested. UNRWA's Lebanon field office reported 222,000 Palestinians residing in the country as of February 2025 — 195,000 Palestine refugees from Lebanon and 27,000 from Syria — against just under 500,000 registered with the agency, a gap UNRWA attributes to unreported deaths and emigration.
UNICEF's Lebanon programme page puts the figure lower still, at roughly 192,000, and describes Palestinians as barred from more than thirty professions.
Forty-five per cent live in the twelve official camps, where UNRWA reports substandard infrastructure, sanitation and housing, and where residents cannot bring in construction materials without Lebanese authorisation. Eighty per cent were living below the national poverty line as of March 2023, on UNRWA's figures.
The camps have been struck. An Israeli strike on Ein el-Hilweh on 18 November 2025 killed 13 people, according to the Lebanese health ministry, the deadliest attack in Lebanon since the November 2024 ceasefire; the Israeli military said it had hit a Hamas training facility.
A drone strike on the same camp in February 2026 killed two, the Palestine Chronicle reported, with the Israeli army again describing the target as a Hamas command and training site.
Then came March. UNRWA activated an emergency response in Lebanon on 4 March 2026, opening shelters at the Siblin Training Centre near Saida and at Battir school in Nahr el-Bared, and reported an airstrike on 8 March in the Taamir area on the periphery of Ein el-Hilweh, inside the camp's security barrier.
By 31 March the agency had registered 1,867 displaced people in the two shelters. Its appeal, launched on 13 March, sought $12.3 million.
A ceasefire took effect at midnight on 16 April and was extended by three weeks on 23 April, UNRWA recorded in its situation report, which noted that both the Israeli military and Hezbollah told displaced people not to return south of the Litani.
Services are contracting as needs rise. On 14 July, 20 of UNRWA's 26 primary health centres and clinics in Lebanon were operational, with six closed — Dbayeh, Ghazieh, Adloun, Qasmieh, Kfar Badda and Maashouk — and four clinics in the Tyre area running only subject to daily security assessments, the agency reported.
Middle East Eye reported in February that UNRWA had cut salaries and working hours by 20 per cent in January as part of austerity measures that also dismissed hundreds of staff.
UNRWA's regional emergency appeal for Syria, Lebanon and Jordan asked for $464 million in January 2025; the previous year's appeal, for $415.4 million, followed a collapse in coverage to 27 per cent in 2023, the agency said. All 60 UNRWA schools in Lebanon finished the 2025/26 year on 30 June.
Alongside the labour question sits the disarmament track agreed when President Mahmoud Abbas met President Joseph Aoun in Beirut on 21 May 2025.
Handovers began at Burj al-Barajneh on 21 August and moved camp by camp — eight truckloads from Rashidieh, El Buss and Burj el-Shemali on 28 August, according to a statement by the government's Lebanese-Palestinian Dialogue Committee carried by Anadolu, and five truckloads from Ein el-Hilweh in September, the Media Line reported.
Al Jazeera reported a fifth phase at Ein el-Hilweh at the turn of the year.
What the camps receive in return has not been published. The Times of Israel reported in September that Hamas and Islamic Jihad had surrendered nothing, and the Emirati daily Al-Bayan reported that the handovers were confined to Fatah's weapons, with the outcome of talks with Hamas unknown. Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian policy network, concluded in November that the process was announced without consulting popular committees or local leaders.
No published Lebanese decision has since opened a syndicate profession, and no figures have been released for how many nursing authorisations the February measure has produced.
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