BAR ELIAS (The Thursday Times) — A fire swept through a camp for Syrian refugees in Bar Elias in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley on Saturday, leaving hundreds of people without shelter as winter sets in, according to witnesses and Lebanon’s Civil Defence.
The blaze broke out at the camp on the Saadeh road in the Zahle district. Witnesses quoted by local reporters said it destroyed all 59 tents, which housed 75 families, or about 486 people, and that no one was hurt.
Lebanon’s Civil Defence gave a smaller count. In a statement on Saturday evening, it said its teams had put out the fire after it burned 30 tents and a car, and that one person who suffered from smoke inhalation had been taken to Al-Nasra Hospital for treatment.
The authorities have not said what caused the fire.
Hosting Syrians
Informal camps of tents and makeshift shelters, many of them in the Bekaa, have housed Syrians who fled the war in their country since 2011. Lebanese authorities estimated the Syrian refugee population at about 1.5 million in January, nearly 880,000 of them registered with the UN refugee agency, UNHCR.
Lebanon launched a voluntary return programme in June 2025. More than 500,000 Syrian refugees were confirmed or believed to have returned from Lebanon by the end of that year, according to UNHCR’s annual report, which assessed about 240,300 of those returns as voluntary.
Lebanon is also dealing with a deep humanitarian crisis of its own. UN agencies warned this week that more than a million people in the country face acute hunger.
