A massive fire engulfed several tents in an east Lebanon refugee camp Monday, killing five people and wounding ten, a security source said.
The source identified those killed as an elderly man and his four children at a Syrian refugee camp in the western Bekaa Valley town of al-Marj.
Ten other refugees were wounded, some sustaining severe burns. Civil Defense forces extinguished the blaze, which engulfed five tents.
The cause of the fire remains unknown.
Monday’s incident comes one week after an abandoned Syrian refugee camp burned down in the same town.
The incident was the latest in a recent string of similar tragedies to befall the estimated 1.5 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon, many of whom live in overcrowded camps and run-down buildings.
Last month, three Syrian children were killed when a fire broke out in their room of their apartment complex in the Zahle town of Barr Elias.
A week before that, three other Syrian children were injured when a fire broke out at a four-story building in the southern city of Sidon.
In March, two Syrian children burned to death when a fire broke out in their house in Dohat Aramoun, south of Beirut.
That incident came one month after three Syrian children died in a fire at their tent in a refugee camp in Bhenin, north Lebanon.
By Nidal Solh
