The War of the Camps (), was a subconflict within the 1984–1990 phase of the Lebanese Civil War, in which the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut were besieged by the Shia Amal militia. The final weeks of fighting has been called War of the Flags. Sometimes described as being Muslim versus Christian, the Lebanese Civil War was actually a multifaceted conflict in which there was nearly as much inter-factional violence between members of the same religion as there was violence between Muslims and Christians. In that respect, the conflict can be compared to the fighting between the Lebanese Forces (LF), a primarily Christian Maronite militia led by Samir Geagea, and Michel Aoun's Christian-controlled faction of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF). Background During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the subsequent Nakba (crisis) of the Palestinian people, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees fled to Southern Lebanon. A few Palestinians with skills and capital were allowed to reside in cities and live dignified lives; the majority, however were destitute peasants who could only offer their unskilled work to the Lebanese economy, and mostly lived in squalid refugee camps near the main cities. Upon arriving in Southern Lebanon, the locals sympathized with their catastrophic conditions, and many were sheltered in Abdul Husayn Sharaf ad-Dine's al-Ja'fariyya school until the authorities dealt with the situation. Sharaf ad-Dine also introduced a Palestinian curriculum known as "Matriculation", to allow Palestinian students to finish what they had started in Palestine. The sympathy was shared by the depopulatees of the Shia villages in Palestine, many of whom were massacred. Even before the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964, exiled Palestinian intellectuals residing in Lebanon and other Arab countries began to form clandestine paramilitary groups in the late 1950s. In 1956, Sharaf ad-Dine's al-Ja'fariyya school organized a guerrilla group consisting of 25 Lebanese and Palestinian students with the sole purpose of launching strikes in Israel. Moreover, prior to the Cairo Agreement in 1969, PLO's chairman Ahmad Shukeiri (1964–1967) had set up a PLO training camp in the southern village of Kafr Dunin. As such, pro-Palestinian sentiment among some Lebanese, in particular the Shiites, was high. However, this unconditional support was dirupted following clashes between the Palestinians and the Lebanese Army in April 1969. Israeli retaliation against Palestinian operations mostly affected the local civilians, and in 1970 had led to the migration of more than 50,000 from the