Sheikh Mohammed met with Bahrain’s King Hamad at his official residence in the capital on Monday.
During the meeting, the leaders reviewed the strong ties between the two countries and pledged to strengthen cooperation to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.
The meeting was also attended by Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed, Deputy Chairman of the Presidential Court for Special Affairs, and Sheikh Mohammed bin Hamad bin Thanoon, Adviser to the President for Special Affairs.
This comes after the two leaders met in April and renewed their calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
They stressed the importance of protecting civilian lives and ensuring access to humanitarian assistance to those in need, and called on the international community to fulfill its responsibility to contribute to bringing peace to the exclave.
They said global action should focus on achieving a “just and comprehensive regional peace,” protecting the rights of Palestinians and supporting a two-state solution to the ongoing conflict.
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Deportation
The Lebanese government has forcibly returned many refugees to Syria since 2011, but this latest deportation marks the first large-scale campaign of its kind, according to the Human Rights Access Center, a nongovernmental organization that monitors the situation of Syrian refugees in Lebanon.
“Until now, the Lebanese General Security Directorate was in charge of the forced repatriation operation, making refugees sign documents stating that they wanted to return to Syria of their own free will. Now the Lebanese army, and in particular the Military Intelligence, is in charge of security operations,” ACHR representative Mohamed Hassan said.
In just the first four months of 2023, the number of deportations will be nearly double that of all of 2022.
Since the beginning of 2023, the ACHR has reported 407 cases of deportation, 200 of which occurred in April alone.
By comparison, only 154 people were deported in 2022.
violence
Violent incidents against Syrian refugees are not uncommon.
Last month, security camera footage went viral showing a group of men violently attacking and stabbing staff at a minimarket after they had argued with the men who had arrived to enforce orders to close the store following the city’s announcement of a night-time curfew for Syrian refugees.
“They thought they were Syrian,” Nahr el-Bared mayor Charbel Bou Ra’ad said of the attackers.
It was later revealed that the employee who was beaten was Lebanese, but the video became a prime example of violence at a time of particularly intense anti-Syrian rhetoric, with Lebanese politicians calling for Syrian refugees to return to Syria.
