Metro’s foreign correspondent Gergana Krasteva reports from Lebanon

When Mahmoud Hashem witnessed two boys fighting in Shatila Refugee Camp, in Beirut’s southern suburbs – one of them threatening to stab the other with a knife – his only solution was to invite them over to his house for a game of chess.

Now, 15 years later, Metro travelled to Lebanon to follow the steps of that incident.

Shatila itself – and its reputation, shaped by history of massacres, scarce resources and exponential growth – have changed little since Mahmoud’s improbable, yet successful, attempt at preventing yet more bloodshed on its streets.

Once a temporary shelter for Palestinians displaced during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the camp has hardened into a permanent settlement and now houses more than 20,000 people – though some estimates go as high as 30,000 – in less than 1 square kilometre.

Soon after the car passes by Beirut’s Sports City Stadium, rows of concrete walls appear ahead.

Stepping inside the camp, a poster of Yasser Arafat overlooks the sagging rooftops of crumbling residential buildings, adorned with Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) flags.

Following Mamoud’s directions, I make my way through the market – this is the main artery of the camp – while dodging speeding scooters, vegetable vendors, and children running in sandals, cheerfully drinking fruit juice from pyramid-shaped cartons.

Several dusty alleyways later through the maze-like city within a city, a door behind an underpass opens, leading to a staircase.

On the third floor, Mahmoud, aged 57, is sitting behind a desk in his office, with a hookah slowly bubbling next to him.

He is now the director of the Palestinian Chess Forum, an educational club for dozens of children who might otherwise be drawn by the camp’s darker pull – competing factions, drug traffickers and religious extremist groups.

‘The environment in Shatila means that there is a need for culture,’ he tells Metro. ‘I wanted to be useful to the community here, so I set up the chess club.

‘Through the game, children can develop their minds and conscience, and learn, and not get drawn to bad things.’

To fund this, Mahmoud sold his car and all his furniture, and moved out of his house to turn it into a space for the club.

Since then, he has been living with his daughter’s family and working in a cafe in the suburb of Ghobeiry to make ends meet and pay the club’s bills and the teachers who dedicate their time.

People told him he was ‘crazy’ but he ignored them after witnessing first-hand the positive impact it made on the two boys he encountered 15 years ago.

After Mahmoud stopped their fight, he continued to invest time and teach them chess for several years until both turned 18 and moved out of the camp.

Following his footsteps, now one of them works in a chess club in Cyprus, teaching several dozens of children.

The club in Shatila boasts 72 members, both girls and boys. Their daily programme includes after-school support and chess lessons as well as other creative activities.

While Mahmoud’s main goal is to keep children off the streets of Shatila, he also hopes to instill in them a deep love for Palestine.

He says: ‘As Palestinian refugees, all our lives are related to Palestine. To return, first, we need to learn how to be attached to the land while apart.

‘My children have grown to love Palestine even more than myself.’

Behind him, a map of Palestine graces the bookshelves in his office. In the room next door, where six girls are moving pieces on the checkerboard with mesmersing precision, the map and flag are painted on the tiled walls.

Gesturing at the two portraits on the wall – of former secretary-general of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, and former Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, who were both assassinated by Israel in 2024, the director says: ‘We are not an NGO, or an official humanitarian organisation. This is why we can have their portraits here.’

Mahmoud adds: ‘Our only rule is that everyone is respectful and ethical.

‘Yes, the club focuses on Palestine, but we have children from many other nationalities.

‘We never ask about that or religion. We do not want to exclude anyone.

‘The relationship between you and your God is for you only, not for us to know. So we do not talk about religion. We fast during Ramadan and then celebrate Christmas.’

Two of his students, Alaa Liddawi, 15, and Zayneb Sayel, 18, did not know anything about chess before joining the club. Practicing the game has now become their favourite part of the week.

Zayneb, a Syrian national who was born in Lebanon to a Lebanese mother and a Syrian father, nods confidently when I ask her if she is a good chess player after a year of learning.

She explains that there is a degree of separation between the realities of life in the refugee camp and the club, where she can just focus on learning.

‘I started coming here after school, every day, and learnt to love it more and more over time,’ the teenager adds, as she adjusts the edges of her cream-coloured headscarf.

For Mahmoud, chess was love at first sight, and provided the same sort of refuge that he hopes to gift to the children in Shatila.

He started learning in 1985, at the age of 17, during the ‘War of the Camps’, a sub-conflict within the Lebanese Civil War, in which the Sunni Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut were besieged by the Shia Amal militia. 

A friend of his family taught him how to play before being martyred in the fighting.

Frequent accidents and the ruthless Sabra and Shatila massacres in the 1980s, during which between 2,000 and 3,500 people were killed by a right-wing Lebanese militia, in alliance with the Israeli army, have left scars on every corner in the camp.

Every next generation continues to bear the brunt of the past, living a life not too dissimilar from the first refugees in the settlement.

Similarly to Mahmoud, Majdi Adam – known as ‘Captain Majdi’ – is working to somehow better the lives of Shatila’s children.

Sat in a plastic chair outside a corner shop, the sports coach points to his chest to draw attention to the red ‘Love Football Hate Racism’ football top he is wearing. It is the message he wants to broadcast to the world.

Beaming with pride, he tells me about becoming ‘famous’ in the camp after launching Basket Beats Borders (BBB) with the help of a friend in 2016.

The project aims to educate young people through sports, and focuses on empowering girls and enhancing their role in life.

The 53-year-old explains that the goal is simple – stop families marrying off their daughters too early and allow them to develop themselves through sports.

He says: ‘I hope to encourage girls to join sports instead. Once they are out of their house, their lives change for the better. They gain more confidence and develop their studies.

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‘A woman is not simply meant to get married, become pregnant and stay at home her whole life.

‘And if I help one girl, I will fix a family. If I fix a family, I will fix our society in Shatila. As you know, the conditions that we live in are very bad.

‘I do not know why girls are not given the same chance, as the boys here, to improve themselves through sport.

‘This is how they can achieve their dreams. Through sport, they can travel and continue their education and find out what they want to do in life. It is beautiful.’ 

As Majdi explains, over the years, the project has allowed the team of girls to travel outside Lebanon and physically ‘break the border’ of the ordinary refugee experience.

Since 2016, the project has grown – with an average of 500 players – and he is now coaching the next generation of girls after the previous cohort, who he described as ‘the leaders in the camp’, are in university pursuing their studies.

Palestinians in the country face severe restrictions, including legal barriers to owning property and working in a number of high-level professions, limited access to public services like healthcare and education, and a lack of Lebanese citizenship. 

For both Mahmoud and Mazdi, educating the next generations in Shatila is paramount to change the status quo for refugees.

Christian Aid is one of the charities working on educational projects in therefugee camps in Lebanon, in partnership with the women-focused NGO Association Najdeh.

The UK-based organisation provided microgrants to 59 community groups in 2024, including the chess club in Shatila.

Leila Younes, Christian Aid programme manager for Lebanon, said about its importance: ‘Recently and since the Israeli attacks on Lebanon, the club also serves as a lifeline for young people to play and help them contend with the psychological trauma resulted from the assault.

‘The club aims to engage with vulnerable children and young people including school defaulters, educational needs and those who may be at risk of joining organised drug gangs.

‘The club also helps with keeping children safe by engaging in stimulating activity outside of school hours.’

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

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Metro’s foreign correspondent Gergana Krasteva reports from Lebanon

My taxi driver keeps one eye on the road and the other on the rear-view mirror, as if expecting smoke to rise ahead of us.

The closer we get to Shatila Refugee Camp, in Beirut&#8217…

The uncomfortable looks came first. As Jane Tiozen, a domestic worker from the Philippines, dipped her feet in the swimming pool of an upscale beach club in Lebanon, she could feel the disapproving eyes of guests on her.

That is when the lifeguard ordered the 33-year-old to exit the pool as ‘the help is not allowed to swim in it.’

Jane, who has worked as a nanny for a family in Beirut for eight years, told Metro: ‘I could sense something was off.

‘Then the lifeguard approached me and told me to get out of the pool. “You are not allowed to swim,” he said.

‘I was shocked. Everyone was staring at me. My whole body was shaking and I could feel that I was starting to cry.’

Incidents of racial and class-based segregation, like this one, are a window into Lebanon’s kafala system, considered a form of modern-day slavery by some human rights organisations.

Under this legal framework – also operating in Jordan and many Gulf states – migrant domestic workers are bound to their employers and denied basic labour rights. Employers are even permitted to take away their passports.

As a result, in many beach resorts across Lebanon, unwritten rules dictate that those considered ‘the help’ are not allowed in pools.

Aware of the physical and sexual abuse that some of her colleagues face, Jane admitted she is ‘one of the lucky ones’ to find a ‘good’ family.

The single mother explained that the incident on June 13 is the first time she has experienced such direct discrimination, but claimed there is a lot of racism in Lebanon and it has become socially acceptable.

Her employer, Maya Nassar, a radio host on Virgin Radio Lebanon and ‘Ms Fitness Universe 2025’, was appalled at how staff treated Jane and caused a scandal, as she put it.

Having grown up in the country, she is aware of this ‘unwritten rule,’ but it was the first time she witnessed it.

The mother-of-four told Metro: ‘There are beach clubs that have rules that people of colour cannot swim in the pools, essentially targeting those who come to Lebanon mostly to work in a house as a helper or as a nanny.

‘These are typically low-paid jobs. There is this horrible mentality that they are not clean, that they have diseases, they are not classy. People want to keep beach clubs “high-end” and having these workers swim is seen as “low class”.

‘I have no idea why these rules still exist. Jane is part of the family and we were extremely angry and upset for her. My children were very confused as they did not understand why she is not allowed in the pool with us.’

Recalling the incident, Maya said that the lifeguard tried to make excuses, saying that he was ‘just doing my job and my job is not to allow maids and helpers to swim’.

She added: ‘What really annoyed me is that he stereotyped Jane. Because she is Asian, he decided that she is the nanny.

‘She could have been anyone. She could have been an ambassador. But he profiled her.’

Neither Jane nor Maya want to name the beach club where the incident happened.

Instead, Maya wishes to pressure the industry as a whole into overturning their internal ‘racist’ policies and in general, help change public perception that domestic workers from South East Asia and Africa ‘spread disease or that they are inferior to us.’

She posted a video on Instagram, where she boasts more than 300,000 followers, in which she and Jane detail what happened at the beach club.

Since releasing it, Maya has been approached by hundreds of people who claim that their employees were also discriminated against at resorts in Lebanon.

Others have not been so kind to her campaign. Maya shared screengrabs of her WhatsApp chat with mothers at her children’s school.

One of them read: ‘The beach resorts are not discriminating – they are just responding to the high demand from their regular visitors and owners.

‘Implementing rules based on this demand is a business decision, not a form of discrimination. Calling for a boycott would likely cause more harm than good, and it is not a solution we should support.’

A recent discussion in the r/Lebanese group on Reddit also proved that Jane’s experience is not unique.

User John Aiden complained that his children’s nanny, who is Filipino, is not allowed to enter most pools in Lebanon.

He wrote: ‘It seems to offend people for some reason. The same goes for beaches (supposed to be public!) and on top of that, they are asking her to wear a bikini, which she does not feel comfortable with [because of her religion].’.

Under Lebanese law, denying people access to swimming pools – public or private – based on skin colour or socio-economic status is considered to be discriminatory and potentially illegal, but enforcement varies greatly.

Maya compared it to the 2011 public smoking ban – a major cultural shock in the country.

She said: ‘The law is not enforced. It is like smoking. Smoking is illegal in public spaces and restaurants. But it is not applied.

‘People smoke anywhere and everywhere. So, it is the same with the beach clubs.

‘Many people feel that they are high class, they are sophisticated. It is a very sick and wrong thing that is happening in our country and I really wish that this would stop.’

In 2006, filmmaker Carol Mansour produced a documentary called ‘Maid in Lebanon’ depicting the gamble these women take when they go to work in the country.

Almost 20 years later, not much seems to have changed for the 200,000 migrant domestic workers, and racism is only one of the issues they face.

Human Rights Watch and Lebanese organisations have documented for years how the kafala system gives employers huge control over workers’ lives, leading to an array of abuses, including forced confinement, and verbal, physical, and sexual abuse.

Aya Majzoub, former Lebanon researcher at HRW, said about the system in 2020: ‘Lebanon’s restrictive and exploitative kafala system traps tens of thousands of migrant domestic workers in potentially harmful situations by tying their legal status to their employer, enabling highly abusive conditions amounting at worst to modern-day slavery.’

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.

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