Ein al-Hilweh, Lebanon’s largest community of Palestinian refugees and their descendants, has long been a downtrodden place, impoverished and racked by factional violence. Its residents usually have a grim view of their future.
But now, the mood here is nothing but exuberant.
Recruitment for Hamas and its armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, is way up across Lebanon’s 12 Palestinian refugee communities, according to Hamas and Lebanese officials. They say that hundreds of new recruits have joined the militants’ ranks in recent months, exhilarated by Hamas’s ongoing war with Israel.
On a rare visit to Ein al-Hilweh, journalists from The New York Times saw posters of the Qassam Brigades’ spokesman, Abu Ubaida, everywhere, his eyes peering out from a red and white checked scarf wrapped around his face like a balaclava, imploring residents to “fight on the path of God.”
In Hamas’s stronghold, the Gaza Strip, where some 40,000 Palestinians have died in 10½ months of war, many people have soured on the group. But elsewhere, Hamas’s willingness to combat Israel has won new adherents.
“It’s true that our weapons cannot match our enemy’s,” Ayman Shanaa, the Hamas chief for this area of Lebanon, said in an interview. “But our people are resilient and they support the resistance. And are joining us.”
Young men milling in a street in Ein al-Hilweh said this was the first time they were hopeful, and they each knew dozens of family members or friends who had joined Hamas since the war began in October. Such enlistment doesn’t affect the fight in Gaza because getting into the territory is prohibitively hard, but it bolsters Hamas in Lebanon. Recruits typically remain in the community, helping to manage local affairs, and sometimes approach Lebanon’s southern border to launch rockets into Israel.
The young men were upbeat that Hamas could win for Palestinians the ability to return to the only home they acknowledge, the land that is now Israel. That such a return will occur, however unlikely it seems, has long been an article of faith for Palestinian refugees.
In the late 1940s, in the wars surrounding the creation of Israel, Jewish forces expelled many Palestinian Arabs, and many others fled in anticipation of violence. Israel has not allowed them or their descendants to return or reclaim ownership of property.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians settled in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. Over decades the camps became built-up towns — often still called camps — that are home now to millions.
In Lebanon, those Palestinians have been barred from gaining citizenship or holding a wide range of jobs.
One such community is Ein al-Hilweh, with 80,000 residents crammed into barely half of a square mile, largely within the Sidon, a southern port city. There is no shortage of men here willing to sacrifice their lives to fight Israel, Mr. Shanaa said, but he refused to say how many had been recruited from the Sidon area.
He spoke at a Hamas-run community center where men sat drinking coffee and eating dates while they watched gory footage from the Gaza war. Pictures of the recently assassinated Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, colored in by children, adorned the walls.
On the streets, a new recruitment poster for the Qassam Brigades showed dozens of smiling young men and boys barely out of middle school superimposed onto Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, a site revered by Muslims. Hamas named its Oct. 7 attack on Israel — which left about 1,200 people dead, kidnapped around 250 and sparked the ongoing war in Gaza — “Al Aqsa Flood.”
The poster offered a training workshop for the new “Al Aqsa generation,” declaring that Jerusalem is “for us.”
Some Palestinians claim Abu Ubaida, the Qassam spokesman, as their Che Guevara, the long-dead Marxist revolutionary who remains a cultural touchstone. Inside Ein al-Hilweh, Abu Ubaida’s picture is nearly omnipresent, adorning scarves and key chains.
Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim militia, political party and social movement with strong ties to Iran, is the most powerful force in Lebanon, with especially deep roots in the south. But in Palestinian enclaves like Ein al-Hilweh, multiple Palestinian groups operate and have followings — some secular and others, including Hamas, hewing to a Sunni Muslim ideology. Hamas, which is also backed by Iran, and Hezbollah are allied in their hostility to Israel.
For years the Lebanese military has barred journalists from entering Ein al-Hilweh, where armed factions have repeatedly battled each other, and the Lebanese military, for control. Under a decades-old international agreement, the military generally stays out of the Palestinian enclaves, which operate quasi-independently within a nation where the weak central government can barely provide electricity, let alone security.
But journalists from The New York Times were able to enter the town, swept up in a crowd of mourners during a funeral procession for a Hamas official, Samer al-Hajj, who was killed this month by an Israeli airstrike. The Israeli military called him a senior militant responsible for launching attacks from Lebanon into Israel; Hamas confirmed that he worked for the group but refused to say what position he held.
Mourners carried the coffin from a nearby morgue through an entrance to Ein al-Hilweh, where a banner proclaimed, “Al-Aqsa Flood Battle, the Battle of Glory and Victory.”
The crowd chanted, “Our blood and our souls we will sacrifice to you, martyr!”
Men fired automatic weapons into the air. “No shooting! Save it for the Israelis!” a woman yelled at them.
The procession snaked its way into the labyrinth of buildings and alleyways so narrow they could barely fit a fruit cart, to Mr. al-Hajj’s home, where his widow and two children awaited his body.
Khaireyah Kayed Younes, 82, said she knew that Mr. al-Hajj, a close friend of her son, was with Hamas, but she did not know he was an important figure until Israel targeted him. She said he was known for his gentle demeanor — he often played with local children — and willingness to lend a hand to neighbors in need.
“This man is from our people, our neighborhood, our camp and what used to be our country, Palestine. We cry for his loss,” she said.
“If one of us dies, 100 will rise up; we won’t stop,” she added, her voice rising to a shout as she wiped tears from her wrinkled cheeks. “We are steadfast!”
Outside Mr. al-Hajj’s home, a woman, Feryal Abbas, led the crowd in chants addressed to Yahya Sinwar, an architect of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, who succeeded Mr. Haniyeh as Hamas’s overall political leader.
“Sinwar don’t worry, we have men willing to give their blood!” she yelled.
Though Israeli officials have neither confirmed nor denied that their forces killed Mr. Haniyeh, as is widely believed, they have said they aim to kill Mr. Sinwar. But whether radical movements like Hamas can be weakened or destroyed through campaigns to assassinate their top leaders has long been a matter of debate among experts who study insurgencies.
They say the strategy of meeting violence with violence, instead of addressing underlying grievances, risks radicalizing more people.
The secular groups that long dominated the Palestinian movement have fallen out of favor. Two decades after his death, photos of Yasir Arafat, the once wildly popular head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, were noticeably scarce and faded throughout Ein al-Hilweh. Photos of his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, were even scarcer.
Conflict between the Palestinian Authority and militant groups like Hamas has spilled over into violent clashes in Gaza, the West Bank and refugee communities, undermining the ability of Palestinians to confront Israel politically.
“The fact that there isn’t a central address in Palestine to negotiate for peace has weakened the Palestinian cause and destabilized the region,” said Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, a research organization in Washington.
Any deal Mr. Abbas makes with Israel can be disrupted by Hamas, he said, adding: “Not one group has the monopoly to negotiate peace or wage war among the Palestinians. And that has weakened them and will continue to weaken them in the future.”
But since October, within Ein al-Hilweh, the groups have stopped pointing fingers at each other — for now.
Read More: In a Grim Palestinian Refugee Community, People See Hope in Hamas
