Rashidieh
refugee camp in South Governorate, Lebanon
Rashidieh, or Ar-Rashidiyah is the second most populous Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, located on the Mediterranean coast about five kilometres south of the city of Tyre (Sur).
Etymology
The camps's Arabic name, "الرشيدية", is variously transliterated as Rashidiya, Rashidiyah, Rachidiye, Rashidiyyeh, Rashadiya, Rashidieh, Reshîdîyeh, or Rusheidiyeh with or without a version of the article Al, El, Ar, or Er.
The London-based Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) and other sources recorded that in the Mid-19th century the settlement was named after its then owner, the Ottoman top-diplomat and politician Mustafa Reşid Pasha, known best as the chief architect behind the regime's modernization reforms known as Tanzimat.
Territory
There is an abundance of fresh water supplies in the area with the springs of Ar-Rashidiyah itself and those of Ras al-Ain nearby.
To its northern side, Ar-Rashidiyah borders the Tyre Coast Nature Reserve.
According to a 1998 fact-finding mission of the Danish Immigration Service, the camp covers an area of 248,426 square meters. Journalist Robert Fisk estimated the size to be four square miles.
History of the site
Prehistoric times
According to Ali Badawi, the long-time chief-archaeologist for Southern Lebanon at the Directorate-General of Antiquities, it can be generally assumed that all villages around Tyre were established already during prehistoric times of the Neolithic age (5,000 BCE), especially in the fertile area of Ras al-Ain, next to the Tell El-Rashdiyeh (the Hill of Rashidieh).
Ancient times
Phoenician times
Many scholars assume that the area of what is now Rashidieh actually used to be the original Ushu (also transliterated Usu or Uzu), founded on the mainland around 2750 BCE as a walled place. It was later called Palaetyrus (also spelled Palaityros or Palaeotyre), meaning "Old Tyre" in Ancient Greek, and was the lifeline for Island Tyre as its continental twin sister: "To an overpopulated island, its mainland territory was a vital necessity, supplying it with agricultural products, drinking water, wood and murex.
“Rashidieh” enters the record as refugee camp in South Governorate, Lebanon. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Rashidieh, refugee and camp can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7294953. Authority coordinates are 33.237, 35.218. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1998.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rashidieh” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.