A spokesman for the United Nations said the assault on the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp outside of Damascus has “transformed” it “into a death camp,” The Telegraph reported Thursday.
Following its brutal, successful battles for control of Eastern Ghouta, the Assad regime, which is backed by Iran and Russia, has turned its attention to the last enclave bordering Damascus still held by rebels. Earlier this month the Assad regime is reported to have launched a chemical weapons attack to defeat the last pockets of resistance in Eastern Ghouta. Hundreds of civilians were reported killed during the regime’s assault on the neighborhood.
Chris Gunness, spokesman for the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), said, “Yarmouk was a refugee camp that had already been transformed into a death camp, and even in that state it has just experienced a week of really intense fighting.”
Thousands of homes in Yarmouk have been destroyed and the camp has no running water according to UNRWA. The last remaining hospital in Yarmouk was bombed and can no longer offer care to the sick and injured.
Before the Syrian Civil War broke out, Yarmouk was home to 160,000 people. When fighting broke out in the camp, the Syrian army put it under siege in 2013. Since then most of the residents have left and UNRWA estimated that before the latest round of fighting about 6,000 people remained there.
Though originally a number of rebel groups were located in Yarmouk, ISIS has defeated the others and has been in control since 2015.
Since the latest round of fighting began, more residents have fled and it’s possible that as few as 1,000 people remain there. According to The Telegraph, dozens of Palestinians and Syrians have been killed in the latest fighting and UNRWA has asked that civilians be allowed to leave.
In a commentary written Thursday, longtime Palestinian affairs correspondent Khaled Abu Toameh observed, “The war crimes committed against the Palestinians in Yarmouk camp have so far failed to prompt an ounce of outrage” from the international community.
He also wondered why so few reporters seem to care about what’s going on in Yarmouk and suggested that it was “because the Palestinians who are being maimed and murdered in Syria are the victims of an Arab army — nothing to do with Israel.”
Citing the London-based Action Group for Palestinians of Syria, Abu Toameh reported that “3,722 Palestinians (including 465 women) have been killed since the beginning of the civil war in Syria in 2011.” Another 1,675 Palestinians have been jailed by the regime and more than 300 have been classified as missing.
Roughly 120,000 Palestinians have fled from Syria to Europe since the beginning of the civil war. More than 50,000 others have escaped to other countries in the Middle East.
“The silence of the international community to the war crimes being committed against defenseless Palestinians in a refugee camp in Syria is an insult,” Abu Toameh wrote.
In addition to the silence from the international community the Palestinian political leadership of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas “are too busy lunging at each other’s throats and trying to take down Israel to pay much attention to their people’s suffering in Syria.”
In a similar vein, Ben Cohen observed in Yarmouk and the Failure of Palestine Solidarity, which was published in the May 2015 issue of The Tower Magazine, “If the story of Yarmouk tells us anything, it is that the Palestinian national movement and its supporters profoundly lack both intellectual imagination and moral integrity.”
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