The Lebanese-Palestinian Dialogue Committee, a government body serving as interlocutor between Palestinian refugees and officials, met on Friday with Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam in attendance.
The group said that “participants agreed to launch a process for the disarmament of weapons according to a specific timetable”.
It added that it also aimed to take steps to “enhance the economic and social rights of Palestinian refugees”.
A Lebanese government source told the news agency AFP that disarmament in the country’s 12 official camps for Palestinian refugees, which host multiple Palestinian factions, including Fatah, its rivals Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and a range of other groups, could begin in mid-June.
Under a decades-old agreement, Lebanese authorities do not control the camps, where security is managed by Palestinian factions.
The meeting comes as the Lebanese government faces increasing international pressure to remove weapons from the Iran-aligned Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, which fought a war with Israel last year.
Earlier this week, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas – leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, dominated by his Fatah party, visited Lebanon and said in a speech that the weapons in the camps “hurt Lebanon and the Palestinian cause”.
During Abbas’s visit, he and Lebanese President Joseph Aoun announced an agreement that Palestinian factions would not use Lebanon as a launchpad for any attacks against Israel, and that weapons would be consolidated under the authority of the Lebanese government.
