When Shia Lebanese refugees began pouring into Palestinian camps more than three weeks ago, the Palestinians, who left what is now Israel in 1948, greeted the newcomers with open arms.
Like the 1948 Palestinians, many of the Shia brought their front door keys with them, thinking they'd go home in a few days.
Um Hussein Farmawi gave food and blankets to the new Lebanese arrivals, and kept her thoughts to herself. She was only 12 days old when her parents fled their village near Acre and has spent 58 bitter years as a refugee.
"If I could, I would tell them to go back to their villages," Um Hussein says. "I wish I could go home tomorrow morning. Even if they die in their houses, they should never leave. I don't want them to lead the life we've led."
Um Hussein's husband Ali is a carpenter. Since the war started on July 12th, he has made 200 coffins, including 35 small ones for children.
"When I make a normal coffin, I keep my composure," he says. "But when I make the small ones I weep. It's like a little life that's been frozen."
Mass funerals for those killed in the villages east of Tyre have been postponed repeatedly out of fear they'd be bombed. Now Farmawi has run out of wood. "The big wood merchants ran away," he explains.
On Thursday, Lebanese refugees broke into the hospital dispensary to seize medicine, he says. "I had to make a new door. It cost $30, but I didn't ask to be paid."
Twenty years ago, the Lebanese Shia Amal movement massacred Palestinians in the "camps war". Yet Ali Farmawi sees no irony in the fact he's now making coffins for Shia.
"They are brothers to us. We are in the same predicament," he says. "We are thankful to the national resistance and Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah."
The Islamic Republic of Iran tried for two decades to forge an alliance with Sunni Muslim Palestinians. Tehran subsidised radical left-wing groups, then radical Islamists.
But this war has for the first time made Iran's proteges in Hizbullah popular on the Palestinian street.
While Sunni and Shia are murdering each other in Iraq, in southern Lebanon they have never been closer. In al-Bass camp, they say the Israeli offensives in Gaza and Lebanon are "the same war".
The Sunni-Shia rift is still on people's minds, though: a Palestinian in the camp has outraged his neighbours by giving his newborn son the politically incorrect name Muawiya, after the man who killed the Shia Imam Hussein.
"At a time when we've welcomed hundreds of Shia!" says Hiam Abu Ayaj, who is Palestinian. "He should name his son Hassan, like my neighbour!" she continues, nodding approvingly at Nadia Hamadeh, also Palestinian and pregnant with her first child.
"If it's a boy, I will name him Hassan, after [ the Hizbullah leader] Nasrallah," Hamadeh says.
When their first daughter was born five years ago, Nasra and Selim Zeitoun named her Salaam (peace).
"The Israelis had just withdrawn from southern Lebanon, and we thought there would be peace," explains Selim. Though a Lebanese Shia, Selim Zeitoun fought with the Palestinian Fatah and Saiqa movements in younger days.
He carries a walking stick, which he claims was a gift from Yasser Arafat.
Had it not been for the illness of his two little girls, he says, the family would have stuck it out in the village of Ramyah, just a few hundred metres from the Israeli border, now a battlefield between Hizbullah and Israelis.
The Zeitouns live with two other refugee families in three rooms, across the alley from the Farmawis.
"When we arrived, the Palestinians were standing outside, waiting for us," says Nasra Zeitoun. "They said, 'It is safe here. Come into our houses'."
The ability to hope is the greatest difference between old refugees and new. Nasra Zeitoun expects to go home in two or three days.
Though Palestinians will not renounce their legal right of return, they know the Israelis will never let them go home. "When the Palestinians die and go to God, they will still be refugees!" laughs Hiam Abu Ajal. She wishes her parents had never left Nazareth.
Hussein Ali Kresht, a Palestinian who fled his village of Tarbikha in 1948, was 15 when he fled. "What is happening now is the same," he says.
"Except that in '48 the Israelis fired bullets to scare us. Now they drop bombs."
Kresht still dreams of his family's six-room house, with thick cut-stone walls and a wood-beam ceiling.
"We didn't even lock it; we thought we'd be back in a few days," he says. "Every day the people around me said, 'You will return'. In 1955, I sneaked back to see my house. The ceiling was caving in. There was no door. I know I will not go back now; it's impossible."
Eight days ago in Beirut, I was in the office of a cabinet minister when a member of parliament rushed in with an urgent question.
"The municipalities are buying pre-fabricated houses for the refugees," the deputy said. "My constituents are panicked."
"No. Tents. Not pre-fabs," said the minister, and the deputy heaved a sigh of relief.
An estimated one million Lebanese - a quarter of the country's population - have been displaced in just over three weeks.
Though Christians, Druze and Sunnis have housed them in schools and government buildings, the uprooting of the Shia is one of the most feared results of this war.
No one has forgotten that it was the presence of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees that sparked Lebanon's 1974-1990 civil war.