'We are all Hizbollahi now'

At lunchtime, I paid a call on Suheil Natour, a Palestinian official in the little Mar Elias camp. His people - the Palestinians and their descendants of the 1948 flight from Palestine - are now hosting thousands of Shia refugees from southern Lebanon, just as those refugees' grandparents once hosted the Palestinians of 1948. This irony is not lost on Natour who points out that the Shias - the largest single community in Lebanon - are now spread over all the country after their flight. "What kind of Lebanon will emerge from this?" he asks me. "How many months have to pass before the Shias feel they belong to the areas of Lebanon to which they have fled - rather than to the wreckage of the homes they were forced out of by the Israelis?"

And when I go home, I find my landlord has treble locked the iron front door of my apartment block, just in case the refugees decide that they belong to his building - or that his building belongs to them.

Crocodile Tears Of Leaders As City Burns, Robert Fisk, 10 Août 2006