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In the Karantina neighborhood, a Syrian family of four lives in a modest ground-floor apartment. The mother works as a house cleaner, and the father in a metal workshop near the port. On the evening of August 4, 2020, a massive explosion erupted—sudden, unannounced. The family thought it was war or shelling. It wasn’t. It was another uprooting—one that reawakened the old fear of displacement. Shattered glass filled the streets and the faces of passersby. A section of Um Issa’s home wall collapsed. Their 13-year-old daughter suffered a concussion fracture in her shoulder that left her arm immobile.

Three days of pain passed without a hospital bed in Beirut; only a painkiller injection from a mobile medical team in Mar Mikhael which delayed the suffering without treating it. On the way to the emergency room, the father carried his daughter in his arms, his own wound stitched with five sutures, reassuring her: “It’s nothing serious, habibti,” though each step weighed heavier than the last. At the hospital door, shame at being Syrian arrived before the ambulance—questions, stares, and demands for papers to “prove” existence.

Many, like them, crossed districts and cities in search of a hospital that would admit them. On the third day, a team from the Jesuit order intervened, securing treatment for the girl at Hôtel-Dieu Hospital without a bill. On the sixth day, grassroots initiatives helped repair what they could of the house. What remained in the father’s pocket was a single paper: “Asylum Seeker Certificate.”

The hospitals themselves had been struck by the blast—destroyed wings, closed emergency doors, or facilities working at half capacity. Roads were blocked by smoke, glass, and debris. Ambulances got lost among the barricades and collapses.

And in a country where Syrians already live under scrutiny, stigma, and the anxiety of a missing document, fear grows larger at the hospital’s white gate. Accessing care became another battle: crossing the city first, then crossing the identity barrier. This is not the story of one family, but a symptom of a system that renders the Syrian visible as a wound, yet invisible as a right. This investigation traces—through data and documentation—how Syrians were erased from the records, compensation lists, and collective memory after the Beirut port explosion, and why “the paper” became a symbol of waiting instead of recognition.

It was August 4, 2020.
The Beirut port explosion killed more than 220 people and injured thousands. Syrians were not far from the heart of the tragedy; they represented the largest share of victims after the Lebanese. Many had escaped Assad’s bombs only to be buried beneath the rubble of Beirut—one layer of trauma atop another.

What’s even more alarming is that the disaster revealed the absence of a central memory to preserve their experience. The memory of Syrians was erased twice: first in the country that expelled them by force, and again in Lebanon, where they were omitted from the official narrative. This erasure not only excludes them locally; it dissolves any chance of incorporating their displacement into a Syrian or global rights-based memory. When a catastrophe is not recorded in the shared archive, its impact remains fleeting, and the refugee’s fragility is perpetuated—an existence without protection, without history.

The August 4 explosion struck Lebanon with seismic force, both literal and social. Its impact did not stop at the port; it pierced the heart of the city. It was as if a bomb had been dropped on Lebanon’s shoreline, hitting both its buildings and its people. The devastation extended beyond material destruction—it fractured Beirut’s demographic fabric. According to Human Rights Watch, the blast left around 218 dead and more than 7,000 injured.

Among these victims, the UNHCR recorded at least 34 refugees, including Syrians, though the real number of affected refugees is believed to be much higher.

But the explosion did not occur in a vacuum; it struck amid a fragile demographic reality already strained by the large Syrian presence in Lebanon. According to government estimates at the time, the country hosted 1.5 million Syrian refugees, including 950,000 registered with UNHCR, while the rest had entered through the open border between the two countries.

Here, vulnerability and legal limbo converge, pushing the Syrian to face unprecedented questions about belonging and existence—especially amid a catastrophe that tore through the country’s demography.

Immediately after the explosion, the Lebanese government announced that the Ministry of Health would cover the cost of treating the wounded and launched international appeals for medical aid and the establishment of field hospitals. At the same time, procedural steps were taken as an initial response, such as granting the victims and their families temporary military status to include them in the compensation system.

Within days, more decisions followed: in September 2020, around 100 billion Lebanese pounds were allocated through the Higher Relief Commission to compensate affected individuals. Then, in January 2021, an additional $33 million was disbursed as a treasury advance to complete compensation payments.

Despite their legal and symbolic importance, the government’s post-blast decisions were drafted in vague terms—referring simply to “victims and those affected”—without any explicit mention of Syrians or other non-Lebanese residents. In practice, this language allowed for administrative discretion and selective implementation: words that appeared neutral but effectively excluded. Thus, justice was never translated into procedures; language itself became an instrument for excluding Syrians from protection.

Syrians were at the very center of the tragedy—they were directly hit by the explosion—yet the law neither registered them nor recognized them as victims. The crucial question is: what does it mean for a person to be erased from the legal record? This is not a mere bureaucratic detail, but a redrawing of boundaries between those entitled to rights and those pushed beyond them. The result: Syrians rendered legally invisible, without enforceable rights and without real access to justice.

In an interview with Daraj, lawyer Farouk al-Maghribi explained: “Excluding Syrians from the compensation framework transformed their right into a new form of harm. Instead of compensation being a binding legal obligation, it was reduced to a temporary humanitarian aid granted through the Higher Relief Commission under the law’s general wording. In this way, the text shifted from a guarantee for all affected individuals to a tool of exclusion and discrimination. This violates both Lebanon’s constitutional commitments and its international obligations regarding the protection of all persons residing on its territory.

The outcome was inequality: some non-Lebanese victims received minimal sums from non-governmental organizations that did not come close to covering their losses, while others received nothing at all. Legally and ethically, the state is bound to protect everyone harmed on its soil, and compensation should be proportionate to the damage. What happened instead was the opposite—compensation itself became an additional injustice, reinforcing the abuse of power and inequality before the law.”

Al-Maghribi added: “A foreign victim can, in principle, file a lawsuit against the Lebanese state before the State Council, targeting the ministry or public entity responsible for the harm, represented by the Litigation Authority. In the port explosion case specifically, the entanglement among ministries, institutions, and security agencies makes it difficult to identify a single responsible party. Still, filing a claim remains possible: it just requires time and clear attribution of responsibility. Generally, the state bears liability toward all persons on its territory, even those without legal residency. Legal protection is a principle that stands independently of residency status.”

In effect, Lebanese law was the first to push foreigners—particularly Syrians—outside the circle of recognition. The texts, couched in broad language about “victims and the affected,” appeared neutral on the surface but laid the groundwork for systemic exclusion by omitting any reference to non-Lebanese individuals. This omission was not a technical oversight but a defining moment that reclassified who counts as a “victim” and who does not. The law thus shifted from being a shield of protection to a mechanism of erasure, excluding foreigners from rights from the very first moment.

The UNHCR itself was shocked by the scale of Syrian casualties—killed and injured alike. According to multiple testimonies collected by the reporter, four Syrian families in Bourj Hammoud, another in Mar Elias (originally from Karantina), and a Syrian construction worker in Achrafieh all confirmed they were unable to reach UNHCR during the first days after the explosion. Many waited outside hospitals for assistance, unable to afford treatment without external help. Thousands of Syrians were wounded and left wandering the streets, but most were never able to contact the UN agency.

Even the UNHCR’s report at the time mentioned only the number of Syrian victims who worked at the port without names or details about the injured. Within days, the agency distributed emergency relief and material assistance, yet it failed to integrate Syrians into the compensation framework on equal footing with affected Lebanese citizens.

The absence of any central documentation system left Syrian victims scattered among hospital lists and fragmented media reports—without a unified record preserving their names or recognizing them as official victims. In the state’s registries, they appeared merely as numbers: nameless dead and injured, stripped of any legal status that would place them within the category of recognized victims.

The rapid aid distributions, though essential, reinforced dependence on charity rather than alleviating vulnerability. Syrians were not treated as partners in Lebanon’s tragedy, but as temporary humanitarian cases—to be helped, then forgotten. In clinics and hospitals, they continued to face social stigma and embarrassment each time they sought treatment or assistance. Meanwhile, this suffering was met with no visible effort by the UNHCR to lead public recognition campaigns or exert serious political pressure, according to several cases interviewed by the investigation.

Moreover, the response lacked any joint operations room or unified database to preserve names and rights. Economically, Syrians were excluded from reconstruction and recovery plans; they were not counted among the affected labor force that should have been integrated into the rebuilding process, remaining confined instead to informal and precarious work.

On the health front, no effective pressure was exerted on the Lebanese state to ensure their medical coverage, leaving treatment costs dependent on NGOs and community initiatives.

In the end, the experience of Syrians in the Beirut port explosion became yet another chapter in their long story of exclusion—visible in daily suffering, yet absent from any legal or historical record that might affirm their place in the collective memory.

A Paper of Waiting, Not Recognition: Law 196/2020 and the Exclusion of Refugees

Not all Syrians have direct access to UNHCR. For those registered as asylum seekers, the agency has become a symbolic umbrella of safety — its hotline more than just a number: a lifeline, a thread of meaning for survival. Beyond that narrow circle, however, thousands remain trapped between Syria and Lebanon: those who came to work without registration, and those who kept one foot in Syria, never fully defined as refugees.

Among them, the injuries were severe with no case number nor legal status to protect them. We met Syrian workers in a warehouse near the port, all from rural Homs. One of them, from Wadi al-Nasara, was wounded in the face by the blast. He bled for hours: no ambulance nor hospital would admit him, and his foreman couldn’t afford to move him. “I thought I’d lost my eye from all the bleeding,” he said. Others had broken arms or deep wounds, avoided hospitals, and tried to treat themselves. Some waited two days with open injuries before crossing back into Syria through smuggling networks in search of medical care. Many were too afraid to approach any Lebanese authority, fearing deportation or being asked for papers.

They lived in layers of fear, physical wounds left untreated, compounded by the absence of any legal identity that could protect them. They recalled knowing other workers who had died at the port, but whose names were never entered into any official record. No list of Syrian victims was ever published, neither by the Lebanese state nor by UNHCR. Their families were left to rely on memory and neighbors’ testimonies instead of an official registry. The contradiction is stark: workers who sustain the country’s daily life disappeared from recognition at its moment of ruin.

Since May 2015, Lebanon has formally requested that UNHCR halt the registration of new Syrian refugees, leaving tens of thousands without any legal status, suspended between being an unrecognized asylum seeker and an undocumented worker without protection. According to World Bank reports, more than 92 percent of working Syrians in Lebanon operate in the informal economy — in construction, agriculture, and services — without contracts, social security, or healthcare coverage.

A year after the explosion, the Middle East Institute published a report titled “Facing the Abyss: Refugees and the Beirut Port Explosion — One Year Later.” It confirmed that Law 196/2020 on compensation failed to account for Syrian refugees’ circumstances. Although refugees made up nearly a quarter of the victims, the law required official documentation that most could not provide, effectively excluding them from financial protection. This means exclusion was not an oversight but written into the law itself. Legislation that was supposed to restore justice instead turned victims into mere “incomplete files.”

The evidence gathered shows that Syrians’ absence from the post-blast landscape was not accidental but the outcome of an integrated legal and political process. Since May 2015, Lebanon’s suspension of refugee registration with UNHCR created a broad category of Syrians with no clear legal status. According to the World Bank, over 92 percent of Syrian labor remained confined to the informal economy, outside systems of protection and rights.

Then came Compensation Law No. 196/2020, which appeared neutral in tone but required official documents the lawmakers knew most refugees did not possess. In effect, the law became a tool of systematic legal exclusion, placing Syrians outside the circle of protection from the outset. Their absence from compensation was therefore not a flaw in implementation, but the direct result of legislation deliberately structured to exclude them legally from recognition as victims.

The Syrian State: Washing Its Hands of the Blood

In an interview with a former employee of the Syrian Embassy in Lebanon (aged 48), we asked whether the Syrian state under Bashar al-Assad had taken any special measures following the Beirut port explosion. He replied bluntly: “There was no official directive from Damascus. Even the paperwork needed for repatriation was processed through regular payment—no exceptions whatsoever.”

He shared the example of a well-known Syrian businessman whose office was near the port and who died in the explosion. The Syrian state, he said, did not treat his death as an exceptional case but handled it through routine procedures: “Even this man—nothing special was done. No one asked whether he had a work permit or if his status justified a different process. It was treated as any other administrative file: papers, a signature, and payment.”

To confirm the account, we spoke with one of the businessman’s relatives, who works in import and export. He explained that the family was indeed required to pay full fees for document authentication and repatriation, with no exemptions or special assistance in light of the disaster. He added that the state did not categorize the death under any legal framework that would allow the family to claim rights, neither as a resident worker nor even as a Syrian citizen whose death in such a catastrophe should have merited exceptional treatment. His death was confined to the cold language of bureaucracy, as if it were an individual absence, not part of a national tragedy.

The ordeal did not end there. After completing the burial procedures, the family was instructed to report to the al-Khatib branch, affiliated with Yasar Ibrahim, a powerful figure within the Syrian regime, to pay a “business fee.” According to the family, this payment was required in advance before burial procedures could proceed.

In this context, legal expert and researcher Firas Haj Yahya told Daraj: “This behavior reflects a recurring pattern in the Assad regime’s treatment of those who left Syria—as if they are adversaries undeserving of protection. The regime limited itself to issuing media statements to avoid domestic and international pressure, without any actual commitment toward its citizens. This can be seen as a deliberate policy separating emotional rhetoric for public consumption from the legal action that entails accountability and responsibility. Simply put, the statements are there to polish the image, while the actions on the ground reveal the absence of political will.”

Although the Syrian state issued scattered statements through various ministries, it provided no assistance to the injured Syrians and no facilitation for border crossings. According to our findings, even with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent stationed at the border, no record exists of any injured persons being transferred from Lebanon to Syria. Haj Yahya emphasized that ” the failure to issue any official directive or legal statement addressing Syrian victims cannot be dismissed as mere administrative negligence, but rather as deliberate omission. The state was fully aware of the scale of the catastrophe but chose to ignore its obligations, either out of fear of opening the door to compensation claims and accountability or because it simply does not view its citizens abroad as a priority worthy of intervention or defense.”

The Absence of an Official Record of Syrian Victims

The absence of any official record of Syrian victims is not merely an administrative gap; it constitutes a violation of a legal duty to document, as stipulated in Article 5(a) of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (1963), which obliges consular missions to register deaths and issue consular documents free of charge and without delay. The failure to uphold this duty left Syrian victims scattered across hospital lists and neighbors’ testimonies, with no official registry acknowledging them as recognized victims.

According to Firas Haj Yahya, this lack of documentation “is not just an administrative lapse but a reflection of the Syrian state’s deeper disregard for transparency and record keeping. The law does not prohibit documentation abroad—on the contrary, it requires the state to protect its citizens wherever they are. The problem is that the Assad regime never considered this duty a priority, neglecting documentation as part of a broader policy of disavowing responsibility. The embassy in Beirut functioned more as an apparatus against Syrians than an advocate for them.”

This silence, then, was not simply bureaucratic negligence but a systematic breach of international protection obligations, and a direct violation of the minimum consular and humanitarian duties owed to Syrian citizens amid a disaster of this scale.

Haj Yahya explains further: “In principle, every citizen has the right to sue their state if it fails in its constitutional duty to protect them or exposes them to danger. This is a right guaranteed under the International Bill of Human Rights, particularly the ICCPR. But in the Syrian context, there is no practical mechanism allowing individuals to hold the state accountable for such failures. In theory, Syria’s administrative courts allow lawsuits against public institutions, but their independence is extremely limited, and cases touching on political responsibility or state protection are usually considered ‘immune’ and never genuinely adjudicated. In practice, a Syrian citizen in Lebanon affected by the Beirut port explosion has no effective legal means inside Syria to claim compensation or accountability.”

Ultimately, the port explosion was not a passing tragedy for Syrians: it was a moment of revelation, exposing their state before its citizens: a law meant to protect reduced to neglected text, and an authority hiding behind empty statements while abandoning its consular and humanitarian duties. Legally, this amounted to a double violation: of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and of the very social contract presumed to bind a state to its people.

The Syrian found himself without an archive, without a traceable memory, a private trauma denied its transformation into a rights-based record. The absence of documentation was not only official but social; survival triumphed over memory, leaving the wound without a record. Names became scattered numbers across reports and hospital logs, closing the door to recognition and justice.

Human rights expert Zaki Shamali argues that this void is not coincidental but a reflection of the limits of international law itself: no legal instrument can compel a state to recognize its victims, whether at home or abroad, because sovereignty remains the governing principle. Even the Responsibility to Protect (2005) was designed to preserve sovereignty, not override it. Thus, international law remains largely a framework of recommendation and condemnation, not enforceable obligation.

When victims are not recorded, they do not disappear—but they are reduced to “bodies without status“. They may later be referenced in trials for crimes against humanity, yet the absence of immediate registration leaves them in a state of “bare life,” without legal memory. Shamali cites the example of refugees killed on the borders of Hungary or Poland: there is no global mechanism to record them or ensure recognition, effectively placing them outside the reach of law.

His central question follows here: Does international law have any real tools to enforce recognition of unregistered victims? The answer: No. Every attempt at enforcement collides with state sovereignty; exceptions remain confined to special tribunals or rare political isolation—products of power, not law. The paradox, as he puts it, is that “international law has no teeth”but it speaks loudly.

The absence of an official record for foreign victims is thus not an administrative oversight but a political–legal choice that reduces the cost of responsibility: every unregistered name means one less burden, one narrower path to compensation. Shamali calls this a deliberate process of producing a “victim without status.” He adds that Syrians themselves did not turn to archiving: they have grown accustomed to survival over testimony, in societies where regimes suppress and falsify the very idea of record keeping.

The result is that the absence of documentation erases not only the symbolic dimension of memory but also deprives families of the right to prove harm, and consequently to claim reparation or justice. Thus, Syrian victims are pushed further into the margins—without record, without status, and without any real chance at recognition: bodies adrift in the void of law and memory.

Every unregistered victim means one less burden on the state. This is not an administrative flaw but a political strategy to minimize legal and moral accountability. When conditions are written knowing refugees cannot meet them, that is not omission—it is codified exclusion. The Beirut port explosion did not only remove Syrians from life; it removed them from the law.

A tragedy becomes memory only when it is told. What is neither written nor recorded remains silence. Syrians were treated as pain without image—as existences unqualified to enter the public realm. They were trapped between three voids: a Lebanese state that denied them, a Syrian state that abandoned them, and an international law without force. Their absence was not only from compensation or care, but from memory itself: names unwritten, stories unkept, victims unregistered.

The Beirut port explosion was not merely an urban or political event; it was a test of justice itself. Some were recorded by history. Others were left outside it—bodies without status, without memory, without trace.