"People never thought they would stay so long, for 60 years," says Olfat Mahmoud, director of the Women's Humanitarian Organization. There are some four and a half million Palestinian refugees. Many live in the West Bank and Gaza, while others took refuge in Arab states such as Lebanon.

Read correspondent Lucky Severson's August 7, 2006 interview in Washington, D.C. with Vali Nasr, a professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.