Burj el-Shamali (Arabic: مخيم برج الشمالي) is a municipality located some 86 km south of Beirut and 3 km east of the Tyre/Sour peninsula, merging into its urban area. It is located in the Tyre District of the South Governorate of Lebanon.

It is particularly known for hosting the second-largest of the twelve Palestinian refugee camps in the country as a de facto autonomous exclave effectively out of the reach of Lebanese officials: The camp is ruled by Popular Committees of Palestinian parties under the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) which is de facto recognised by the municipality through some degree of coordination and cooperation. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has the mandate to provide basic services, assisted by local and international NGOs. The Lebanese Armed Forces control entry and exit through the camp's main gate.

Burj el-Shamali – also transliterated into the spellings of "Borj" or "Bourj" combined with a version of "Shimali", "Shamali", "Shemâly", "Chemali", "Chamali", or "Chmali" with or without the article "el", "al", "ech", "esh", or "ash" – is commonly translated as "Northern Tower", as done by E. H. Palmer in the 1881 Survey of Western Palestine (SWP).

The settlement is named after a medieval tower on its main hill that overlooks Tyre. The Arabic word "Burj" reportedly originated from the Ancient Greek "pyrgos".

Burj el-Shamali reportedly covers an area of 1.069 hectare, rising to an elevation of more than 60 metres on a hill overlooking Tyre/Sour peninsula.

Together with the built-up areas of three adjacent municipalities – Sour on the peninsula and the coastal areas to the West, Abbasiyet Sour to the North, and Ain Baal to the South-East – the urban part of Burj el-Shamali (6.8 km²⁾ has integrated into one greater metropolitan Tyre. There are also unpopulated agricultural lands, especially in its Northern and Southern parts. Altogether there are 24 distinct neighbourhoods in Burj el-Shamali. The Palestinian camp is only one of them:

Though Burj el-Shamali is often used as a synonym for the camp, it is important to see that it has just a size of about 135,000 square meters and thus covers but a tiny fraction - little less than 1% - of the municipality's overall territory. While it is less dense than other refugee camps in Lebanon, it is still one of the world's most densely populated areas. A 2017 census counted 1,243 buildings inside the camp and in adjacent gatherings with 2,807 households.

There are five unofficial entrances: former village streets barricaded with cement blocks that allow pedestrians to pass, but not cars. The camp is irregularly shaped, following the property lines of land rented by the Lebanese government for 99 years. [..] When you cross that border, you are in a zone of urban informality. The unplanned streets and haphazard buildings announce that this is a place of legal exception, outside regulation, where a state of emergency is the norm. [..] The camp is divided informally into neighborhoods named after agricultural villages in the Safad and Tiberias regions of Palestine.