PALESTINE:Orange trees, pomegranates and an olive tree stood outside the Majdoub family's house in Palestine. "All I want now is to be buried under that tree when I die," says Fatima Majdoub (72).
"No one can sign away our right to return to the land we owned," said her husband, Rushdi Abdel-Raziq (71), in Beirut's Shatila refugee camp, scene of one of the civil war's most notorious massacres.
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas said yesterday talks on refugees, borders, water, security and the divided city of Jerusalem must start immediately, but the estimated 4.5 million refugees' fate is unlikely to be determined any time soon.
Few observers expect any sort of breakthrough in the Arab-Israeli peace talks that started in Annapolis, Maryland, yesterday. US president George W Bush said the conference aimed to launch negotiations, not conclude a deal.
Shatila's residents deemed the meeting unlikely to attain even that modest goal.
Majdoub was 12 years old in April 1948 when news came that Jewish nationalist militias had killed villagers in nearby Deir Yassin, close to Jerusalem.
"They brought some of the bodies to our village to bury them and scare us," she said. "We fled - what else could we do? We didn't have arms to defend ourselves." Her family walked for seven days to Lebanon, eventually ending up in Karantina, east of Beirut.
When right-wing Christian militias attacked Palestinians and Muslims there in 1975, at the outbreak of Lebanon's 15-year civil war, they fled to Shatila, only to survive another massacre in 1982.
Lebanese Christian militiamen went on a three-day rampage, killing anywhere between 700 and 3,500 Palestinians and Lebanese under the watchful eyes of their Israeli allies.
Lebanon's Palestinians are widely seen as having the roughest lot, banned from working most professions and owning property outside 12 decaying and miserable camps. Lebanon's fragile sectarian balance means relations with their hosts are uneasy at best.
Siham Balqis, a mother of one, said Bush had an eye to his legacy, with 14 months of his term to go. "It will be like all the other conferences, all pressure on the Palestinians and none on Israel. America sees with one eye only," she said, referring to Washington's close alliance with Israel.
Abu Nour, minding a trolley loaded with bread in a rubbish-strewn alley overhung with a mesh of cables, agreed.
"The Arab leaders will sell us out, they'll come under pressure to absorb the Palestinians so Israel doesn't have to."
By the light of an oil lamp during one of many power cuts in their war-scarred home, Abdel-Raziq produces the birth certificate of his father, dated 1910, the Ottoman Empire. He ceremoniously stamps a piece of paper with the brass seal of his father, the headman of Abkar village.
Such relics of a bygone life are treasured in the camps. The couple said they wanted to go back to their village in what is now Israel, not the West Bank or Gaza. "After all these years, am I supposed to return to Palestine as a refugee?" Abdel-Raziq asked. "Are we supposed to just forget?"