Palestinian refugees in makeshift shelter in Lebanon. Credit: Mutuwalli Abou Nasser/IPS

By Mutawalli Abou Nasser
BEIRUT, Jul 6 2014 (IPS)

Tens of thousands of Palestinians living in Syria have been uprooted since the violent government crackdown on the uprising and the ensuing battles that ensnared their communities. For around 50,000 of them, Lebanon was their only safe route out but now it seems this door is being closed on them.

The family of 19-year-old Iyad was exiled from Palestine in 1948 upon creation of the state of Israel and fled to Yarmouk camp in Damascus, Syria, where they settled but violence and war have once again uprooted their community. Iyad now finds himself on the run from Syria, but his security in Lebanon is far from assured.

Having fled to Lebanon in December last year, Iyad was intent on traveling onto Libya and from there to make the perilous journey to the now renowned Italian island of Lampedusa. However, last month his plans were thwarted when the Lebanese security services detained him, along with 48 other young Palestinian men, as they tried to leave Lebanon through Rafiq Hariri airport in Beirut.Trapped in a Kafkaesque labyrinth, more and more Palestinians are being forced to smuggle themselves across the border, putting themselves in the increasingly vulnerable position of living in Lebanon without valid papers.

After less than ten hours of investigation, the officials decided to deport the young men back to Syria because they did not have the correct papers. In taking this step the Lebanese authorities were reneging on a previous policy not to forcibly return any refugees fleeing the bloodshed next door.

Under the new restrictions, Palestinians from Syria cannot enter the country unless they have permission from the Lebanese General Security and meanwhile the Syrian authorities are not giving permission for any Palestinians to leave for Lebanon without prior consent from the Lebanese embassy.

What is more, border guards have the discretion to turn Palestinians back without referring back to the main authorities in Beirut. Trapped in a Kafkaesque labyrinth, more and more Palestinians are being forced to smuggle themselves across the border, putting themselves in the increasingly vulnerable position of living in Lebanon without valid papers.

Human Rights Watch has warned that the Lebanese government is violating the international principle of “non-refoulement”, which forbids states from returning asylum seekers or refugees to a place where their lives or freedom would be threatened.

“There is no way I can return to Syria, not under any conditions. I am of military age and I know they will take me into the army and make me carry arms and kill. I will not do it. I will not fire a gun in a fight that is not my fight,” said Iyad. He has since made his way back into Lebanon where he is lying low.

Mahmoud was among the group alongside Iyad, but now he talks of his fears of being snapped up by the Syrian security services if he crosses back into Syria. He does not have many options but he says he will “do the impossible” not to return to Syria.

“I know I am wanted by the Syrian security services and we all know what happens once you go into one of those places, it’s a one way ticket. They don’t even deliver the bodies to the family. They just tell them their son has died of an illness and that they are keeping the body,” he told IPS.

“We are worried that if they start deporting our youngsters and they are wanted by the security services on the other side then we know very well their fate is either prison or death. We need an answer to the question of Palestinian refugees fleeing Syria, especially as the one window they used to have was Lebanon,” said local human rights monitor, Alaa al Sahli.

The Lebanese government clearly has the right to defend its borders and the huge influx of refugees is putting immense strain on the country but the Palestinians desperate for some semblance of safety and security are asking why they are the ones being singled out.

The United Nations agency responsible for Palestinian refugees in the Middle East said it have been given assurances by the Lebanese government that the restrictions are only temporary but to date there has been no indication of a change of course. Dozens of Palestinian families have been separated or stranded with the change in the rules.

Nour came to Lebanon with her family around a year ago but with their finances drying up and no end of sight to the fighting in Syria they decided to try and emigrate as refugees to Europe.

Nour borrowed the equivalent of 400 dollars to travel back to Syria with her little daughter to fix all the papers that the family would need to travel to Europe. It was too expensive to travel with her husband and three other children so they stayed in Lebanon. Having jumped through all the bureaucratic hoops, Nour and her daughter returned to the border only to be refused entry by the Lebanese officials there.

“I don’t know what happened. It makes no sense. My husband and children are in Lebanon and I am here with my daughter. The border guard told me that I can’t get through and the rest of the family will have to come back to Syria if I want them to be with me, but what do they expect me to do? Take my family and go and live on the streets to face hunger and war and death?” she said.

A briefing issued on July 1 by Amnesty International highlights the desperate plight of families torn apart while trying to cross into Lebanon. Among others, the human rights organisation says that its research has found evidence of a policy to deny Palestinian refugees from Syria entry into Lebanon altogether – regardless of whether they meet the new conditions of entry.

This evidence includes a leaked document, apparently from the security services, instructing airlines using the main Beirut airport not to transport any traveller who is a Palestinian refugee from Syria to Lebanon, regardless of the documents they may hold.

“The Lebanese authorities must immediately end the blatantly discriminatory policies towards Palestinian refugees arriving from Syria. While the influx of refugees has placed an immense strain on Lebanon’s resources, there is no excuse for abandoning Palestinian refugees who are seeking safety in Lebanon,” said Sherif Elsayed-Ali, Head of Refugee and Migrants’ Rights at Amnesty International.

Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have always been marginalised, and often scapegoated, especially since their prominent role in Lebanon’s own protracted civil war from 1975 to 1990. Now, as the region is fracturing under the strain of the Syria conflict, they find themselves once again pilloried and punished for a war that was not of their making.

The celebrations over food aid at Yarmouk camp in Damascus were short-lived. Credit: Niraz Saeed/IPS.

By Mutawalli Abou Nasser
DAMASCUS, Mar 29 2014 (IPS)

For just that moment, the refugees in Yarmouk camp in Damascus made news. After months of facing starvation and death in the shadows of the Syrian civil war came packets of food and aid in January – with cameras in tow.

The refugees poured out on the streets in a river of desperation to claim the first deliveries of aid that made it into the besieged area. Grown men were reduced to tears as their terror and isolation were momentarily broken.The escape from siege and warfare in January was as brief as it was desperate.

But the camera crews have since moved on, and hunger, violence and disease have returned to torment the people stuck in the camp.

Yarmouk camp in Damascus used to be the largest community of Palestinians living in Syria. They had to leave their homeland in the wars of 1948 and then 1967. It was a flourishing and vibrant neighbourhood in the capital, home to more than 100,000 people.

By late 2012 the camp became embroiled in the increasingly malignant civilian conflict, and it has suffered for it. Rebels have been engaged in long and bloody battles with the forces of President Bashar Assad.

Yarmouk has faced siege tactics, indiscriminate bombardment, and sniper fire, as have other neighbourhoods. The tactic seems to have been to subdue whole populations. It seems to have succeeded.

Rebels in many of the besieged areas, including Yarmouk, entered into fragile truce with government forces and their allied militias earlier in the year. A string of local agreements were brokered to put the fighting on hold, and to allow food and medicine in and civilians out.

The escape from siege and warfare in January was as brief as it was desperate. “UNRWA [the United Nations Relief and Works Agency] remains deeply concerned about the desperate humanitarian situation in Yarmouk and the fact that repeated resort to armed force has disrupted its efforts to alleviate the desperate plight of civilians,” UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness said in a statement.

Until recently resourceful volunteers had been working to maintain some rudimentary education system for the children and adolescents trapped in the camp. Working without institutional support, they were doing what they could to ensure the conflict would not leave a lost generation in its wake.

Now, the teachers and volunteers have had to close the classrooms. It’s not just bombs and snipers that have put a stop to their work but disease. The collapse of the healthcare system, chronic shortages of food and clean water, and accumulation of waste are combining to give rise to a number of health epidemics.

“One of our students fell unconscious in class, we took him to hospital and they diagnosed him with hepatitis,” Dr Khalil Khalil, a founding teacher of the makeshift school project, told IPS. “We then had all of our students tested and found at least seven other cases. The spread of this and other contagious diseases means a decision has been made to stop convening the classes.”

Making all this worse, fighting has erupted again. “The recent truce failed and the amount of vaccines and medication that made it into the camp were nowhere near sufficient to treat the plethora of diseases and illnesses we see spreading through the camp, especially among children,” Wissam Al-Ghoul, community health worker at the local Palestine Hospital, told IPS.

Fighters from both sides used the insufficient quantities of aid that did make it into the camp to reward their own.

“Members of the security services at the checkpoints seized some of the aid to distribute among their people, and rebel fighters stole some of the aid for their families and people close to them,” said food aid organiser Abou Salmi. “There is no order, and we suffer for that.”

About 7,000 parcels of aid are believed to have made it through the blockade in January. UNRWA concedes this was a “drop in the ocean” for the approximately 20,000 people who remain trapped in the camp.

In the spell when the siege was lifted, government forces and the Palestinian factions allied to them kidnapped many they suspected of supporting the rebels. Those picked up included children.

At least 30 men and adolescents have been detained, and their whereabouts remain unknown.

“Members of the Syrian security services, along with their allies from the PFLP-GC [a Palestinian faction allied to the Syrian government] detained at least 10 young men in front of my own eyes…We also know of people being lured to outlying buildings, and they were then kidnapped and whisked away,” said an UNRWA staff member who was among the team that oversaw the food aid. She asked not to be named for security reasons.

Each side blames the other for the breakdown in the ceasefire. “The regime did not release any of the detainees it had promised to, or secure the safe passage of food,” said Abu Khitaab from the ideologically extreme rebel battalion Jubhet al-Nusra.

“We pulled out of the camp fully as agreed but instead of releasing prisoners the regime began kidnapping young students and activists and to occupy some buildings inside the camp. We could not tolerate this, so we moved back in and resumed the battle.”

Regardless of who carries the responsibility for breaking the deal on which the ceasefire was built, for the innocent within Yarmouk the reality has returned to the same difficulties – a steady descent back into virtual imprisonment, and the chaos of fighting. Now, with disease added on.

A Palestinian family from Yarmouk camp in Syria now living on the fringes of Ein el Helwe camp in the south of Lebanon. Credit: Mutawalli Abou Nasser/IPS.

By Mutawalli Abou Nasser
BEIRUT, Jan 6 2014 (IPS)

Over the past year more than 50,000 Palestinian refugees have fled violence, chaos and destitution in Syria to seek sanctuary in Lebanon. The vast majority have found themselves living in dire poverty, and trapped in chronically insecure existence.

Denied assurances of legal residence many are unsure if and how they can continue to live in the country into the New Year.

“Who, I mean really who from the Palestinian families can pay 200 dollars for the papers for every family member? If the average family is five people, then that is 1,000 dollars. This is impossible as we know most Palestinian refugees aren’t even sure how they are going to feed their children one day to the next,” Mahmoud Assir Saawi, president of the Council for Palestinian Refugees Fleeing from Syria told IPS.

Such sentiments are reiterated time and time again within the squalid camps and overcrowded ghettoes throughout Lebanon. Palestinians arriving from Syria find themselves in an administrative and bureaucratic morass hobbled by decades of troubled history and war that offers them scant security.

Many of the Palestinian refugees from Syria will have originally been uprooted from their homeland in 1948 upon the creation of the state of Israel, or during the six-day war in 1967 when the Israelis comprehensively defeated the neighbouring Arab armies. New war has exacted its toll and around half of their communities in Syria have fled once again.

Lebanon has received most of this exodus, and of Syria’s neighbours it is perhaps least able to accommodate the influx.

The presence of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Lebanon has always been a highly divisive issue, with many Lebanese blaming Palestinians for the role they played in the nation’s rancorous civil war from 1975 to 1990. The arrival of large communities of their compatriots this past year has further exacerbated existing fears and prejudices.

It is perhaps for this reason that the arriving Palestinians have been classified as ‘guests’, ‘migrants’ or ‘displaced people’. To afford them the more apt title of ‘refugee’ would bring with it legal obligations, most notably under the Geneva convention, which Lebanon would struggle to realise.

Fears of Palestinian, and even Syrian refugees settling in Lebanon permanently, and thus shifting the precarious sectarian balance within the country, are common and are regularly aired in the media and by politicians. As such the refugees’ status remains vulnerable and their sanctuary insecure.

Securing residency papers remains one of the biggest problems for Palestinian refugees from Syria. Upon arrival Palestinians fleeing war and hunger are only granted a one-week visa in Lebanon, which then must then extend.

In the overcrowded and destitute Chatilla Palestinian camp in Beirut, refugees from Syria have staged sit-ins at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) offices. The international organisation was already struggling to provide basic services to the approximately 420,000 Palestinian refugees already living in the country before the outbreak of the Syrian crisis. UNRWA has been tasked by the Lebanese government with extending these services to the new arrivals.

Palestinian journalist Maher Ayoub from Yarmouk Camp in Damascus knows first hand about the vulnerability of life in Lebanon. On a recent trip to renew his papers he was ordered to leave the country within the week, despite assurances from the Lebanese government that it would not throw out any refugees.

Faced with incarceration in Lebanon or a perilous return to Syria, he has taken refuge in one of the Palestinian camps Lebanese security services are not allowed to enter under an agreement reached at the end of the civil war.

“Where can I go? What can I do? I have no options now,” Ayoub told IPS.

Many other Palestinian refugees distrustful of the security services or fearful of being unable to pay their annual visa renewal fees are seeking cover within the camps. The reality is a life of incarceration in chronically overcrowded hovels of destitution where unemployment is rife.

“We know they are our brethren and we must help them but this is becoming untenable,” said Abu Ahmad, a Lebanese-Palestinian resident from Chatilla camp. “I used to get at least a week’s work every month but now there is nothing. Every day we are seeing problems in the camp because of the desperation and the lack of work. People are even starting to pull weapons on each other. We need more support.”

A UNRWA report showed a shortfall in the organisation’s budget by 68 million dollars. The different Palestinian factions have proven unable to absorb the strain.

For the Palestinians fleeing Syria’s war the struggle looks set to continue in 2014 as they try to build a semblance of stability in their lives.

A resident in the Palestinian Yarmouk camp in Damascus prepares to slaughter a dog to feed his family as food supplies run out under siege. Credit: Mutawalli Abou Nasser/IPS.

By Mutawalli Abou Nasser
DAMASCUS, Oct 25 2013 (IPS)

Acute food shortages have reached desperate levels in the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus. Leading religious figures in the camps have issued a fatwa permitting the killing and consumption of cats, dogs, mice, rats and donkeys.

“We have been under siege for three months. There is nothing left to eat. This is what has become of us,” said a resident of Yarmouk as he prepared to kill a dog for his family following the fatwa (religious ruling).

Residents are struggling to keep children from dying.“We have been under siege for three months. There is nothing left to eat. This is what has become of us."

Jana Ahmad Hassan is less than three months old. She is severely malnourished and faces starvation. She was born in the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, Yarmouk. For more than three months the camp has been under siege from the Syrian armed forces. In the face of scarcities this has brought, Jana’s life now hangs in the balance.

“For god’s sake my son, I have a starving baby girl in the camp,” her mother pleaded with one of the soldiers at a checkpoint. “I need to get some milk for her and food for me or she will die.”

Her pleas were violently rebuked. “You think you are a mother? If you understood anything, you wouldn’t have gone out of the camp and left her at home,” the soldier said. She was sent empty-handed back into the camp.

With Jana’s mother failing to produce milk, her father has searched tirelessly for formula for the child but he has repeatedly been told that there isn’t a single box to be had in the south of Syria. Many rebel-held areas such as Yarmouk are suffering from acute shortages of food under the siege.

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) aims to bring food assistance to up to 6.5 million Syrians between now and the end of the year. The challenges in doing so are monumental.

The rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation in Yarmouk and some of the other Palestinian camps in the south, such as Sabina and Sayeda Zeinab, has resulted in a severe breakdown in relations between the residents of the camps and the bodies traditionally charged with their welfare – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO).

In mid-July residents of all three camps addressed a letter to the PLO and UNRWA requesting they exert all their efforts to have the siege lifted. They also said that if UNRWA could not fulfill its responsibility, it should transfer the refugee camps file to the United Nations General Assembly.

The residents asked for the International Red Cross to be given access to Palestinian refugees. They warned of an impending state of famine.

Months later no meaningful changes have come. The areas under siege in the south continue to expand, engulfing more than half a million civilians in the southern region, including tens of thousands in the Yarmouk Camp.

“Not so long ago people were allowed to bring in a bit of food. Now they have closed the refugee camp with checkpoints and there is a total siege,” Prof. Abu Salma, an official from the Charity Commission for the Relief of the Palestinian People, told IPS.

Since early August there have been a number of demonstrations outside UNRWA buildings, where the organisation’s flag has been burnt. The feelings of discontent among camp residents have been exacerbated by perceptions of corruption and neglect among UNRWA staff.

“We tried as employees to strike against the practices of the director of UNRWA, so he sent us letters stating that all who strike will be fired,” said a senior employee at the agency, speaking on condition of anonymity. Due to some recent revelations about the practices at UNRWA, a director has been arrested and accused of corruption.

The Charity Commission for the Relief of the Palestinian People has succeeded in providing at least some humanitarian relief to the Palestinian camps. But of late it has come under attack from the Syrian armed forces. Protestations that the organisation is politically unaffiliated and purely humanitarian have not spared it the government’s crackdown.

“They have started arresting our cadres, and arrested the general coordinator of the commission, Ali Shihabi. The situation is worse than bad in the camps, it has actually become a matter of collective murder,” Prof. Abu Salma told IPS.

The classroom in Yarmouk refugee camp is under constant threat of aerial bombardment. Credit: Mutawalli Abou Nasser/IPS.

By Mutawalli Abou Nasser
DAMASCUS, Aug 25 2013 (IPS)

The school system in Syria’s largest Palestinian refugee camp Yarmouk, located in capital Damascus, has been shattered by the fighting that now bedevils the community and the siege that strangles the district. Some tenacious teachers are, however, refusing to leave the camp and are battling against odds to provide education to an ever-growing number of youngsters.

Elements of the armed opposition took control of much of the camp in December 2012. This was followed heavy and indiscriminate shelling from government forces that continues to this day. A suffocating siege has been laid on the camp population.

When the battle struck into the heart of the camp in the closing weeks of 2012, and fighters from the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) and sympathetic Palestinian factions took root in the community, fighter jets from the government forces started to rain down destruction. The established education infrastructure quickly unraveled amidst the onslaught.

Teachers and education workers were among the thousands who fled the camp to more secure districts or to neighbouring countries such as Lebanon. This seriously disrupted the school system. The situation became worse after the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the body that is responsible for primary and intermediate education for Palestinians in the Middle East, halted operations in the camp."They are just children who want a peaceful life, who want to avoid this ugly death that is everywhere in Syria now.”

The responsibility for secondary education to Palestinian communities lies with the Syrian ministry of education. But the only two secondary schools in the camp are precariously ensnared on the front lines, and were shut even before December 2012 as violence encroached on the borders of the camp.

Following the suggestion of Dr Khalil Khalil, an Arabic language teacher and lecturer at the University of Damascus, four teachers established an education programme at the Palestine mosque in the heart of the camp.

Initially 20 children came to the classes. But that number has steadily grown to around 200. This is encouraging for families, but has also put great strain on the teachers and the standard of education they can offer.

“It has become difficult for us to continue our work as before,” Dr Khalil told IPS. “We have needed to find places to educate these children but that is not easy at all in the camp at the moment. Then there are those essentials for education such as books and notepads and pens….But the most important thing is the security of the children and those that are volunteering to teach them.”

In the programme’s nascent stages the teachers were able to obtain resources through their own networks or through donations from some of the wealthier parents. But as the numbers of students grew, they sought UNRWA support.

“It became a case of securing more and more books and pens and electricity generators with fuel to run them on, as well as getting more teachers who we could provide a basic stipend, if not a wage,” Yehya Ishmaawi, one of the founding teachers told IPS. “It was no longer a case of providing some basic education support but trying to revive the complete education programme.”

With increased resources and more volunteers trained to support the teachers it became important to gain official recognition so that students could legitimately sit exams and progress within the education system. Once the teachers demonstrated the impressive gains they had made, UNRWA backed the programme.

“This is an unofficial route we are following but the most important thing is that we don’t allow the students’ education to be disrupted and we enable them to sit the exams on time, and under the supervision of UNRWA,” Jemaal Abd al-Ghani, the UNRWA official appointed to liaise with the teachers and volunteers running the programme in Yarmouk told IPS.

To overcome the siege and obtain the necessary education material, the teachers are tapping individuals and agencies bringing essential food supplies into the camp. Some of these partners have also paid for education resources, and paid stipends to the volunteering teachers.

The wider community and the parents have played a no less critical role. “If it hadn’t been for the faith of the families and their support for our mission to revive the education system it could not have happened,” said Dr Khalil. “They played a very big role in the beginning even in providing books or fuel from their homes for the generators that light the shelters.”

The teaching is not immune to indiscriminate aerial bombardment. On Apr. 1 this year a mortar strike landed next to the Palestine Mosque as a group of children were leaving a makeshift classroom next door. A number of children were wounded, and the blast proved an ominous harbinger for worse to come.

Within days another strike killed two students, Farhat Mubarak and Hesham Mahmoud, and seriously injured three others. “Why the craziness of this random strikes?” pleaded Farhat’s father. “There are no armed men here.  They are just children who want a peaceful life, who want to avoid this ugly death that is everywhere in Syria now.”

The savagery has so far claimed the lives of 149 Palestinian children in Syria, 56 of them in Yarmouk camp, according to the Palestinian Human Rights Association. The children of Yarmouk continue to search for hope and to rediscover the joy of their games that have been buried beneath flattened homes.

Medical services are increasingly difficult to provide in Syria. Above, a field hospital. Credit: FreedomHouse/CC by 2.0

By Mutawalli Abou Nasser
DAMASCUS, Jun 5 2013 (IPS)

It was nine in the morning when the shell landed in front of nine-year-old Hella al-Abtah’s house in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus. Hella survived the initial blast but was critically wounded in the head, and her father rushed her to the Palestine Hospital, blood pouring from the laceration.

Doctors at the hospital managed to stabilise Hella, but the relief was short-lived. Because of a chronic shortage of critical medical supplies and frequent power cuts, they could not complete even routine procedures. Hella passed away, hers one of many needless deaths due to collapsing medical services in the besieged Yarmouk camp.

Before the Syrian uprising began in March 2011, Yarmouk, which, with a population of 125,000, was the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, was a bustling hub in Damascus and home to one of the busiest markets in the city.

Now Yarmouk has become a violent battlefield subject to daily bombardment. Until 2012, Palestinian camps had mainly stayed out of the Syrian conflict, but many are now fully engaged in the fighting.

Since opposition fighters established a permanent presence in Yarmouk, the Syrian army’s siege on the camp has resulted in a complete ban on any medicine or medical supplies entering the camp."It is simply impossible for us to deliver sometimes even the most basic services."
-- Abdullah Hariri

The collective punishment enforced on the community, as well as the direct targeting of individuals or groups offering humanitarian support, has severely weakened medical services available to the camp’s embattled residents.

Losing services

The only place where Yarmouk’s residents can still receive medical treatment is the Red Crescent-run Palestine Hospital. The other two main hospitals were shelled and destroyed by fighter jets and artillery, and many medical staff have fled the camp over the past four months.

Meanwhile, the United Nations Works and Relief Agency (UNWRA), the main body that offers social services such as education and health care to the Palestinians, has withdrawn its entire staff from Yarmouk camp due to the deteriorating security situation. With their evacuation, the community lost many essential health services.

And while doctors, nurses and medical students continue to treat patients in the Palestine Hospital in spite of the risks, the siege on the camp has rendered much of their work impossible, creating shortages in supplies from blood to electricity to the most basic medicines.

“It is simply impossible for us to deliver sometimes even the most basic services, because we have been starved of the essential supplies,” said Abdullah Hariri, a doctor at the Palestine Hospital.

Doctors, nurses or activists who have attempted to smuggle medical supplies into the camp have been targeted as well, with some killed and scores in prison, and hospitals in areas under rebel control, such as Palestine Hospital, are regularly shelled.

Staff have been threatened and intimidated on multiple occasions by security service personnel to abandon their humanitarian mission.

Violations from both sides

Elements of the armed opposition are no less innocent, having abused, threatened and extorted medical professionals in the camp, stolen resources and fuel from the hospital and even opened fire within the building.

“Once, some fighters came and demanded we hand over one of our staff, saying she was a collaborator,” said a doctor at the hospital, who asked to be called by his nickname, Abu Hakam. “This is such a loathsome accusation when you consider [that] she, like us, has chosen to stay, serving the people of the community.”

When hospital staff protested and barred the entrance to the hospital, fighters threatened the staff with guns, forced their way through and kidnapped the nurse. Although she was eventually released after extensive interrogations, such incidents increase the vulnerability of medics who remain active in Yarmouk.

Power shortages and electricity cuts are also hobbling efforts to offer even the most basic medical services.

“Because of the cuts in power supply to the camp, we have to use the electrical generators,” described Hussam al-Hariri, a doctor at Palestine Hospital. “This requires fuel, and as everyone knows, the regime blocks the entrance of fuel to the camp.”

“We have to buy fuel at exorbitant prices, even though we said from the outset that we don’t have any political stance,” Hariri added.

On top of all these challenges, Yarmouk camp has become refuge of sorts to many civilian refugees and opposition fighters from the suburbs and countryside south of Damascus. What remains of the camp’s debilitated medical services has to serve these communities as well as the Palestinians who refused to leave.

Despite having been reduced to a most basic level of operations by both the government’s siege on Yarmouk and aggression from members of the armed opposition, for the residents and refugees in Yarmouk, the camp’s medical infrastructure nevertheless remains critical, for they have little else.