The double refugees from Shatila
Shatila is a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Beirut. It was built to house around 3000 people after the 1949 Arab-Israeli War to house the Palestinian refugees who fled or were displaced during the 1948 Palestinian exodus. Shatila turns seventy in 2019 and is one of the oldest refugee camps in the world.
There are 12 Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon with a total of around 500 registered refugees. Lebanon's neighboring country Syria once offered another 000 Palestinian refugees accommodation in 560 camps. Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war, more than 000 Syrian-born Palestinians have fled Syria and become so-called "double refugees". As a result, the number of refugees in Shatila rose from 13 in 110 to an estimated 000 people, who are now crammed into about one square kilometer.
Of all the neighboring countries of Syria, Lebanon has taken in the most people seeking protection in relation to its population. However, they receive neither accommodation nor food from the state. And getting a work permit is practically impossible. As a result, the refugees in Shatila live in great poverty. The camp also allegedly has one of the highest urban populations in the world and is bursting at the seams, a dark, crowded concrete maze with high crime rates and a high number of attacks on women
The refugees in the camp all share one hope: to leave this prison as soon as possible and fly to another country.
Christian Bobst
Reportage photographer Christian Bobst originally studied graphic design. For almost 15 years he worked for advertising agencies such as Wirz, Advico, Young & Rucicam and Jung von Matt in Switzerland and Germany and has received several international awards for his work. In 2010 he started his own business and started working as a freelance documentary photographer. Since then he has realized numerous photo reports and commissions in Europe, Africa, Asia, North and South America. His work has been featured in magazines, daily newspapers and online media such as Stern, The Guardian, NZZ, Die Zeit, The New York Reviews of Books, Huffington Post, LensCulture and Geo. In 2016 he won, among other things, the 2nd prize of the World Press Photo Awards in the Sport Stories category, in 2017 he was awarded the vfg Swiss Photo Award, the Photo Prize of the Canton of Solothurn and in the USA at the NPPA and the PDN Photo Annual. Christian Bobst lives in Zurich and is a member of the laif photo agency in Germany.