Bassem Eid was born in the Jordanian-occupied Old City in East Jerusalem, whose place of residence became the United Nations Refugee Works Agency (UNRWA) refugee camp of Shuafat. Bassem Eid spent the first 33 years of his life in Shuafat. He rose to prominence during the first Intifada, the Palestinian uprising and was a senior field researcher for B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. In 1996, he founded the Jerusalem- based Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. In 2016, Bassem assumed the role of Chairman of the Center for Near East Policy Research.