Syrian refugees in Lebanon are being forced to tear down their own homes in an attempt by the Lebanese authorities to pressure the displaced into returning home, Britain’s The Guardian reported. In the border town of Arsal, informal settlements that house 55,000 refugees were the scene of frantic activity under the hot summer sun on Friday as young men took apart the breeze-block homes with pickaxes, hammers and drills, covering the ground in rubble and dust, it said. “We don’t have anywhere else to live and there is no one to help us,” the newspaper quoted 84-year-old Rasmeera Raad as saying. She sat with her two disabled adult daughters in a makeshift mosque near the site of their old house, The Guardian said in a report published on Sunday. Local officials have decided to implement an army decree demanding the demolition of Syrian concrete structures more than one meter high before July 1. But families decided to carry out the work themselves over fears that the army will come with bulldozers and raze the camps to the ground. They wanted to save the few possessions they own. The British charity Edinburgh Direct Aid (EDA) as well as the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) have helped to construct and move families into new wood and tarpaulin shelters, said The Guardian. “I cried when we got the order to demolish our home,” it quoted a 47-year-old father of five, Mohamed al-Qasem, as saying. The man has lost his leg after a shelling attack in Syria. “The breeze-block walls protect us from the worst of the winter storms. I couldn’t do the work with one leg but I had no choice, even if it took me six months on crutches. Now we can relax – our home is finished and we have obeyed the army rules. But what about the next time they order us to do something? We never know.” Fearing displaced Syrians would permanently settle – like the Palestinians before them – the Lebanese government has not allowed the creation of formal refugee camps and outlawed the construction of “permanent residences” using concrete.