SIDON, Lebanon: At the corner of an old building, behind Quds Square in Sidon, is a mound of bags filled with scrap metal and other trash.

At first glance, it appears to be just a heap of rubbish that the municipality has neglected to remove, but on closer inspection, one sees a different reality. This dump veils a human tragedy: Home to two Palestinian brothers, Mohsen and Jamal Bourshali, a horrid smell permeates the air.

After the Nakba in 1948, the Palestinian refugee Ali Bourshali, father to Mohsen and Jamal, fled Akka to Lebanon, and lived in a home near Sidon’s coast, a home that was destroyed during the 1982 Israeli invasion when the family was again displaced.

Mohsen, now 63, then rented, with his brother Jamal, a small apartment near the Quds Square roundabout. Their abject poverty prevented them from keeping up with rent payments, and so they relocated to a small garage nearby, which they transformed into a home and a storage space for scrap metal and other resellable materials found in dumpsters.

Then, several years ago Jamal, now 51, developed health problems, stemming from obesity, which rendered him bedridden. Meanwhile, during his work, Mohsen fell down an elevator shaft, resulting in a head injury. Although he survived, the accident affected his movement and his concentration levels.

“My head hurts and I feel dizzy,” Mohsen, who does not have any children and divorced 30 years ago, said.

Seven years ago their garage burned down due to an electrical fault. All the contents of their home and everything Mohsen had been collecting from dumpsters – stones, cement, clothes, plastic and metal – was destroyed.

The two brothers then moved to a makeshift shelter under a metal awning nearby. Among bags filled with rubbish, and in darkness lit only by a small lamp, Mohsen now sits, in a shelter more akin to a prison cell than a home.

Every day, Mohsen searches for any garbage that can be salvaged and sold on, which he carries back home on his bicycle. There, these rubbish-filled bags, covered in a couple of dirty pillows, become his mattress. There are breadcrumbs and onion and tomato slices scattered around – the possible remains of lunch. Mohsen, in rags, and wearing worn-out mismatched slippers, with his eyes welling up, said: “Could there be anything more humiliating than this? My brother and I are alive only because we are not dead.

“Haven’t you suffocated from the smell? Flee this place before the smell kills you.

“We have been living on the streets for seven years, without anyone to care for us,” Mohsen continued.

“We collect scrap metal and sell it for a total of LL3,000 per day. There is no alternative. Yesterday I went to get medicine from UNRWA, but they told me just to take Panadol.

“One tendon in my hand has been severed, and it needs surgery,” he added.

Mohsen, or Salim as he is known locally, would welcome charity.

But, he said, “No one looks to our tragic situation. A local charitable organization gives me food parcels every two months, and I went to Hezbollah and they gave me LL50,000 and Dar al-Fatwa gave me the same amount. As for Palestinian organizations, they give nothing. Not one pound, nor a cigarette.”

What he makes from scrap metal just covers his daily intake of food: tomatoes cooked at home.

The room is open and exposed to insects, rats and cats. “Don’t be afraid, they don’t bite,” Mohsen said.

He talked a lot of his brother’s health needs, explaining that Jamal needs special care: “Jamal needs medicine and hospitalization.”

Jamal, sprawled out on a mattress, has not been outside, or seen daylight, for years, as without a wheelchair he cannot move freely.

The neighborhood’s residents say they help the Bourshali brothers as much as they can, providing them with food and water.

However the owner of a nearby shop said: “They have isolated themselves. But we are not bothered by them, we have only concern for them.”

But, he added: “Horrid smells come from their storage room, and the rats have started to enter our homes.”

Mohammad Tayesh, a local resident, said that more needed to be done to help the brothers. “They need their shelter to be completely cleaned out.”

Tayesh has drawn up a plan to end the two brothers’ misery. “If we solve Jamal’s health issues, we have solved half of the entire problem. We need a large wheelchair to give him freedom from this prison he has holed himself up in, and so he can see the sunlight which he has been deprived of for years, and which has clearly affected his psychological well-being.”

And he added, “If he was to leave his shelter then his state of mind would improve and then we could send him to a health care center, where he would receive the treatment that he needs.

“Ideally the next step would be to sell all the scrap metal and rubbish in their shelter, and then somehow provide them with a fixed income and a clean apartment. We are ready and willing to volunteer to help carry out this plan, to save the lives of the two brothers.”