JOLIE TOURS REFUGEE CAMPS IN LEBANON
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[ December 24th 2004 ]

Hollywood actress and UN goodwill ambassador Angelina Jolie and her four-year-old adopted son paid a Christmas visit to Palestinian orphans living in refugee camps in Lebanon. The 29-year-old Academy award winner and star of the 2001 film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider wanted to meet refugee children and introduce her Cambodian-born son, Maddox, to those less advantaged than himself, an aid official told AFP.

Jolie, an ambassador for the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, has already visited crisis-torn Darfur in Sudan and refugee camps in Thailand. Checked into an exclusive Beirut hotel under a false name in a bid to shun the parapazzi, Jolie refused to talk to the press. About 400,000 Palestinian refugees live in Lebanon deprived of basic rights in squalid camps -- a legacy of the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel that caused a mass exodus of Palestinians to neighbouring countries.