This is the Guardian. Hello, I'm Claire Longrick, Deputy Editor of The Guardian Longreed.

We've selected some of our favorite pieces from the year so far, and I'm going to introduce one of them today, which is called scars on every street, the refugee camp where generations of Palestinians have lost their futures by Heath Abdullahad.

Heath writes for the long read from all over the Middle East he's written pieces on Iraq, on Syria and Yemen.

After the October 7th attack on Israel, it quickly became clear that Israel was going to hit Gaza very hard. And the question seemed to be,

what's going to happen to the people in Gaza? Where are they going to go?

Heath wanted to go to the Chateila refugee camp in Beirut. This is where Palestinians went

80 years ago the first people to be displaced and now four generations successively have lived there.

It's also the site of a notorious massacre in the early 80s, so it's really become a byword for

the worst possible situation, I think, for the Palestinians who had to leave their homes.

It began as a small-tented camp on the outskirts of the city and has since been absorbed

into Beirut and become a neighborhood, but it's now got more than 15,000 inhabitants,

maybe many more. And Gertz describes brilliantly how it's kind of been built upwards rather than outwards it's sort of hedged in by the rest of the city and

it's just extraordinary improvised neighborhood where people are living cheek by jowl but really they can't work and they can't leave.

And so the sort of increasing despair and desperation and the violence of the militias that are running it and controlling areas of it

produce this extremely difficult and harsh living conditions.

One of Gheath's great talents is really talking to people and getting their stories and he speaks to people who are devastated and bereaved,

particularly one man has son has gone overseas.

So these desperate stories of people who are absolutely stranded and trapped and traumatized. So this story gives us really a very powerful

answer to the question you know where do Gazans go when their home is

destroyed and if Chatela is the answer, it's a pretty desperate future.

Welcome to the Guardian Long Reed, showcasing the best long-form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking.

For the text version of this and all our Long Reed, go to the Guardian.com forward slash long read.

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