LONDON — There they were, the three of them on the Lebanese-Syrian border. Umm Ibrahim (not her real name), her husband dying of cancer and their little boy, Saeed, stateless since the day he was born in Lebanon. The Palestinian family originally from Syria’s Yarmouk camp had been unable to register the birth of Saeed two years after he was born in Lebanon. Their last hope was to take him to Damascus.

“General Security refused to fix the husband's residency and they refused to register his child’s birth,” Umm Ibrahim's sister, Soheir, told Al-Monitor from her new home in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley in September. “By then the boy was 2 years old. His father didn’t have residency … so it was impossible.”

The family was stuck in a vicious circle of irregularity, the kind that has regularly impacted Palestinian refugees from Syria who fled to Lebanon after the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011.

Soheir’s family, like other Palestinians, saw Syria as the only way out. They would go there to get cancer treatment for Saeed’s father and register the birth of their son.