This paper investigates the extent to which acting as a ‘male-provider’ is still an avenue open for coming-of-age and display of gender-belonging for the shebab (‘lads’) of the Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon. The literature on Palestinians prior to 1948 suggests that a man would come-of-age by marrying at the appropriate age and having a son. When it comes to the saga of the Palestinian diaspora in Lebanon, acting as a fiday (‘fighter’) worked, throughout the 1970s, as an alternative mechanism for coming-of-age and display of gender-belonging. The central question of this paper is how the shebab today come-of-age and display their gender-belonging, when the Lebanese legislation, through what I name ‘institutional violence’, bars their free access to the labour market, forcing them to postpone marriage plans, and participation in the Palestinian Resistance Movement, in its military version, is not an option anymore. Through a plethora of investigative techniques – participant observation; questionnaires; focus groups and open-ended interviews – I have registered the differences between the fidayiin and their offspring as far as their coming-of-age and gender-display are concerned. While the fidayiin were pure agency – understood as ‘resistance to domination’ – and display their coming-of-age and gender-belonging through what they identify as the fight to return to their homeland, their offspring have a far more nuanced relation to Palestine and articulate their coming-of-age and gender-belonging through different mechanisms: by building a house and marrying. Effectively, by observing how the shebab do their gender, it is not only the full historicity and changeability in time and space of ‘masculinity’ that come to the fore, but also the scholar concepts of agency and gender that can be, respectively, transformed and undone. As a matter of fact, the tendency in studies of the Middle East to define gender strictly in terms of power and relations of domination fails to grasp the experiences of those, like the Shatila shebab, with very limited access to elements of power. It is not that the shebab are emasculated, but rather that defining agency only in terms of ‘resistance to domination’ and gender in terms of ‘relations of power’ alone is rather restrictive.