The death of a Syrian woman and her child as a result of a fire that broke out in one of the Arsal refugee camps, in eastern Lebanon on the border with Syria, left a wave of grief and sorrow on social media.
Returning to the details of the painful incident, the fire broke out this morning, Tuesday, in a camp for the displaced Syrians in Al-Shafaq neighborhood in the town of Arsal.
Eyewitnesses told Anadolu Agency that the fire resulted in a number of injuries, the burning of 5 tents, and the death of a mother and her child from suffocation, after they sought refuge in a room adjacent to the burning tents.
Fearing the rapid spread of the fire, the residents appealed to the owners of water tanks to go directly to the camp to try to control the fire.
After the civil defense managed to completely control the fire, it became clear that the fire had surrounded the woman and her child, and they were quickly transferred to "Awda" hospital in Arsal, where they died.
According to a number of accounts on Twitter, the deceased woman is called Basma Alaa Al-Youssef, 31 years old, and her child, Ayham Bashar Al-Youssef, is 5 years old.
On the communication sites, activists published video clips documenting what happened, showing how the fire destroyed parts of the camp and devoured everything, amidst the residents' questions about the reasons that led to this.
According to the information circulated, the fire damaged at least 4 tents, in addition to injuring a number of refugees.
Commenting on what happened, the governor of Baalbek-Hermel, Bashir Khedr, expressed his regret over the tragedy that Arsal woke up to today.
He stressed that the fire was extinguished by a number of Arsal residents and Syrian refugees, stressing the need to adhere to public safety conditions inside the camps to avoid similar accidents.
Arsal camps host about 80,000 Syrian refugees, in addition to about 40,000 refugees in camps located in the outskirts of the town.
difficult situations
The number of Syrian refugees residing in Lebanon is about 1.5 million, according to official estimates, and most of them suffer from difficult living conditions, especially with the exacerbation of the economic crisis in this Arab country.
A number of those interacting on the platforms considered that this fire and the human and material losses it left behind is another tragedy experienced by the Syrians who fled years before the war in their country.
A number of the participants believed that what the Syrians are going through cannot be tolerated by the mountains, while others considered that the Syrian tragedy is continuing, and every time a number of them go through a new ordeal.
For its part, the "Molham Volunteer Team" launched a campaign to help those affected, and said, "We all wake up daily terrified of hearing or seeing painful news about our families, but today, unfortunately... the painful news was from Arsal, a number of tents in Al-Shafaq camp were completely burnt, The families lost everything they owned and even their identities, and one of the mothers and her child died."