Shopping for refugee care isn't limited to the camps. At Tataoine Hospital, which had several wounded soldiers in its wards when I visited in late June, administrators had yet to take delivery of $1,000,000 in UNHCR-pledged medical equipment, and had received no money for additional medicine and surgical supplies. The swell of refugees, which doubled Tataoine's population, has overburdened the hospital, which has been pressed into service treating rocket and gunshot wounds. "This goes through protocols," said Kamel Derich of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, who runs that agency's efforts near the crossing, a bit helplessly. "The Tunisian Red Crescent hasn't presented me a budget."

Buckling, the hospital started outsourcing to the Qatari and Emirates governments. A doctor at the Emirates camp, which has a three-tent medical clinic, has also been authorized to work at a smaller hospital at on the border, where he stabilized wounded men brought out of the mountains in Libya. The Emirates camp even arranged for a gynecologist to visit regularly.

Tataoine hospital is sending some of its lab work to Qatar's refugee operation at the Tataoine stadium, which has more modern equipment.

"They send us one or two cases a day," said Osama Saleh al Zami, who runs the medical lab at the Qatari refugee camp. He showed a tent of lab equipment, refrigerators, and boxes of medicine, some from Tunisia but most from Qatar, he said, because the labels were in Arabic, rather than French, which he doesn't speak. Zami's assistant, Mohamed ben Amar, had been on staff at Tataoine hospital, but now splits his time at Qatar's lab, because the pay is better, he said.

"We can say Qatar is five star, Emirates is two star, and UN is one star," said Hamad Awam, the Benghazi charity representative. "Everyone knows the Qatar camp is the best. But people come and they go. Every day they see their sons go to Nalut, to Azintan, maybe they stay with a family, maybe they go soon to Djerba [a Tunisian island and resort town near the border]."

Inside Libya, Qatari flags fly beside rebel ones at the entrance to Nalut. If the Qataris are jockeying for influence with the rebel government when and if Qaddafi falls, they're doing pretty well.

• • •

The issue no one much cares to speak about in Tataoine is not legal. Four hours drive north, an entirely separate constellation of refugee camps, built around the town of Choucha, house a much larger population of refugees -- but most of them are not Libyans. These northern camps mostly hold non-Arab, black African men. Caught working in or transiting through Libya when the war broke out, they hail from places that will not take them back or would kill them if they did, and are now effectively stateless.

For months, Choucha's desperate thousands received greater attention than those in Tataoine, but it has been the wrong kind of attention. Six weeks ago, residents of a nearby Tunsian town attacked the camp, setting part of it on fire. UNHCR has yet to improve the increasingly hard conditions in the camps. Where in Tataoine the story has been Tunisian hospitality to Libyan families, and support for the rebels, in the north the story has become one of desperation. Some refugees have made desperate efforts to reach Italy in skiffs. Amnesty International, responded by dispatching two investigators to Choucha in early June. UNHCR, which built the disastrous Choucha installation, is now, according to Derich, looking to move it.