Palestinian Refugees in Syria: The Crisis in Yarmouk

We are also very fortunate that we could be joined today by our colleague Christopher McGrath who is the Senior Liaison Officer and acting head of the Washington Representative office of UNWRA. He will tell us about the rapidly deteriorating situation in Yarmouk and UNWRA’s efforts in Syria. I should note that Mr. McGrath is also privy to a special perspective in his role as Senior Liaison. He represents UNWRA’s interests within the United States government, both the executive and legislative branches within the American-based media, the NGO community and the American public. Mr McGrath previously served as Information Officer for USAID West Bank and Gaza and as Operations Officer for the Iraqi parliamentary elections in 2004-2005. He holds a Master’s in International Relations from the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and a Bachelor’s in Government from Skidmore College. Chairing our panel today is Yousef Munayyer, the head of The Jerusalem Fund and Palestine Center, who has so graciously hosted us today. Please join me in welcoming our panelists.

Yousef Munayyer: Thank you very much Michele, it’s a pleasure to host another event with the Institute for Palestine Studies, especially on this very important and timely topic. Anytime we can give voice to a Palestinian perspective on issues so important to Palestinians, we think it’s an obligation to do so and was great to find out about Nidal and his work and I also highly recommend the perspective that he wrote in the Journal, it’s great background for this issue. I also want to thank the American Friends of UNRWA in helping promote this event today. I’d like to get right into discussing this issue with our panelists. I’m going to begin with Nidal, who’s going to share his perspective and then we’ll move on to Chris.

Nidal Bitari: Thank you Yousef and thank you all for coming on this cold Thursday but you will feel warm if you turn on the TV and watch people in tents in the camps of Syria. As usual in all panels, I can’t leave without saying this objection because calling it a “civil war” is really upsetting me. It started as a really peaceful and a very beautiful uprising in Syria. It was really a revolution. Anyways, talking about Palestinian refugees in Syria. I came to represent them because I am not under siege, I am not under starvation in the camp but I can talk about my experience there, about my colleagues and my peers and my friends who have been killed and arrested inside Syria and the camps.

You know that of about 62 camps around neighboring Palestine hosting 3 million Palestinians, about twelve of them are in Syria. The biggest one is Yarmouk Camp. Yarmouk is the largest camp, the Palestinian population in Syria is between 800 thousand and a million, about 105,000 of them are in Yarmouk. It was established in 1957 after the Nakba and almost all the Palestinian factions are represented inside this camp. This camp is very involved in foreign policy around the world. There are a lot of movements and a lot of centers about the Right of Return and about Palestinian rights. A lot of Palestinian leaders were born and grew up in this camp. Regarding the Palestinians in Syria, they had a very privileged situation, comparing conditions in Syria to the situation in Lebanon and Jordan. If you are talking about economic, cultural, and social rights, they had all their rights before the uprising: the right to work, the right to education. The Palestinians in Syria had these rights as much as the Syrians themselves had.

Since the Syrian uprising started, Palestinians went back to Lebanon, Iraq and Kuwait. So there was a very conscious decision that we don’t want to be a part of this crisis in Syria. Being neutral is the best thing we can do for Syrians themselves. Even now when I remember my Syrian friends, when we were asking what can we do to help them, they said, “Just host us and hide us in your homes because a lot of us are wanted.” Even Syrians themselves, and the leaders of the Syrian revolution, the peaceful revolution, almost all of them have experiences with Palestinians actually. Some of them were born and grew up inside the camp. They were telling us to just be quiet and help hide them from the Syrian regime forces. It was a very good decision to be taken. Just as the Syrian sphere had been divided between pro and anti-regime, the Palestinians were also divided. Some of us were pro-regime and some of us were against the regime.

There is a very high percentage of integration between Syrians and Palestinians in Syria. It’s not like Lebanon. For example, you don’t see checkpoints at the gates of the camp, you don’t see army centers in front of the camps and checkpoints asking for an ID when you are getting in and out of the camp. You can’t even recognize the borders of the camps from neighboring areas. The Palestinians in Yarmouk are minorities actually but really the Syrians became Palestinians inside the camp. Why has what is going on in the camps now happened? It’s just simply because the Palestinian factions are also divided and some of them have decided to support the regime’s military such as the Popular Front General Command and they went to attack the Free Syrian Army around the camp. At that time, there were rumors about the zeroing in in Syria, which was that the Free Syrian Army was saying that they would go into Damascus so they argued that Yarmouk is their gate to Damascus. Many factions gathered together and met the Free Syrian Army and had arguments and reasons to invade the camp. Since the Free Syrian Army entered the camp, there was a lot of contact with their leaders and the revolution’s military council and unfortunately the Revolution Council said they don’t have control over the Free Syrian Army inside the camp which started stealing houses and hospitals. They started stealing a lot of equipment from hospitals inside the camp. In addition, there was an air attack, the regime attacked the camp in December 2012 and at least 20 people have been killed in that attack.

People started to leave the camp for neighboring areas outside Damascus. Some of them were lucky to go to Lebanon or have money to leave the country to Europe or Egypt. A lot of Palestinians don’t have the money to travel and the Syrian documents which they hold don’t even let them enter a number of countries. For example, none of the Syrian Palestinians can reach Jordan and many times the people from the Deraa Camp in south Syria fled to Jordan and they were sent back to Syria by the Jordanian government and were at risk of being killed because of the shelling and battles between the Free Syrian Army and the Syrian regime. It’s also a very unstable situation in Lebanon, bombs every day and explosions.

I spent about a year and half in Lebanon before coming here the United States and I saw that the Lebanese were very welcoming to the Palestinians despite the history of the Lebanese Civil War. Maybe because of the experience in the Civil War they welcomed Palestinians. But you know that Lebanon does not have the capacity to hold more than 1,300,000 refugees. The numbers of the UN are saying that about 850,000 refugees are registered but if you go through the civil society organizations, you can see that more than 1,300,000 refugees are registered now in Lebanon and you know that the economic situation in Lebanon is not good enough to host these numbers. And when the Lebanese government asked to be supported by 184 million dollars to host these refugees, they had been given a loan. I believe the Lebanese government can’t pay any loans anymore.

Regarding the starvation now inside the camp, the starvation started because the Syrian Regime and the General Command is seizing the camps. They are preventing any kind of food and assistance from entering to people. Until a week ago, UNRWA could enter some assistance to the camp after many trials. The point is you are seizing the camp and you are preventing any assistance to enter while you are preventing the civilians from getting out of the camp. This is the reason, this is the point and this is the question; preventing people from leaving the camp, the war and number of people dead from the war. Yesterday about 100 people have been (I do not say they died) killed by starvation inside the camp. Many of them are children and many of them have been born in Palestine and then died there in the camp in Syria. It’s a good point to highlight that the Syrian regime is arguing a lot about its defense of Palestinian rights and its support of the resistance. I don’t know how such a regime can support resistance and kill Palestinians inside its camps.

On documenting violations inside the camp, it was a very big, difficult and also dangerous mission to be done because a lot of activists who were monitoring and documenting violations against civilians have been killed, and I call them assassinated actually, by the regime or were arrested and died under torture inside the prisons. The last friend had been killed about two weeks ago, his name was Hasan Hasan and he was arrested just because he tried to go outside of the camp. Even inside the camp, some battalions of the Free Syrian Army are arresting the activists. So the Palestinian Association for Human Rights has been established since the seizure of the camp and it was established by the late Ahmed Kousa who took the responsibility of listing all the names and the numbers of people who were killed and arrested by the regime or the Free Syrian Army. And he was in cooperating with the VDC (Violations Documentation Center), which was directed by Razan Zeitouna who was kidnapped in Douma about a month ago. We have a very good network inside the camps; they are taking this risk and reporting to us about each village. We established three reports and now we are working on the fourth one. The fifth one will be about the destruction inside the camps. Every ten years we have a ceremony regarding Palestinian refugees so we go back to Jordan in 1970 and then the Civil War in Lebanon and then to Iraq. Until now there about 200 Iraqi Palestinian refugees on the border of the Al-Hol camp for about ten years and there is no solution for them. When we talk about the Gulf War and Kuwait, about 800,000 Palestinians had been kicked out of Kuwait because of their political perspective.

I read an article in Haaretz written by Gideon Levy, he is blaming Israel and saying they are the real reason for what is going on inside Yarmouk now. It’s true, they didn’t contribute directly but they are the reason we are now refugees and suffering. The solution of Palestinian refugees is to not just see another course of events in the future but to find a final solution and permanent status for them. They should not be bending on the negotiations between Israel and Palestine. They should have all the rights of refugees. I have a question now. Maybe Chris can answer it. Why do all the refugees in this world have the right to be protected by the UNHCR but the mission is only to work and relieve. How come when people fled from Syria to Lebanon and other areas, they didn’t have the right to be resettled in another country?

Mr. Munayyer: We’ll turn now to Chris for the perspective from UNWRA.

Christopher McGrath: Thanks Nidal, that was very good. Thanks Yousef for having us here.

First I think it would be helpful to provide a little background about our operations in Syria in general. There are roughly 540,000 Palestinians who are normally refugees in Syria, 80 percent of whom are in Damascus or around Damascus. Prior to the conflict, as Nidal mentioned, Palestinian refugees had been treated fairly well in Syria and were afforded a wide range of rights. Property ownership had some limits and travel abroad was a little bit regulated but other than that by and large they felt relatively secure. Most struggled and worked really hard to provide for their families but I think overall they valued the safety and stability they enjoyed.

Unfortunately they have been hit particularly hard by the current crisis in Syria. six of the twelve camps have become theaters of war, including Yarmouk. As of now, we’re reporting about 51,000 Palestinian refugees who have fled to Lebanon, about 11,000 to Jordan, 6,000 to Egypt, 1,100 to Libya and 1,000 to Gaza. Others have fled elsewhere as well including Turkey, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia but those numbers are a little bit difficult for us to estimate. In addition to those who have fled, about half of those who stayed have been internally displaced, about 280,000 Palestinian refugees and many of them multiple times. We’ve repeatedly heard that even from our own staff who said they’ve been forced to move their families often more than once.

Half of our health clinics in Syria, eleven out of 23, are now not functioning, although we have been able to establish eight health points, which is what we’re calling them, which are primarily located in the places where the refugees have fled to. Forty-two of our 118 schools remain operational, with 68 closed because they’re damaged or they’re located in insecure areas. Eight are operating as temporary shelters for displaced individuals, Palestinians and Syrians alike. Eight others are operating simultaneously as both shelters and schools. In addition, we’ve been provided access to about 36 government schools in the afternoon.

So in total we have about 47,000 Palestinian refugee children who are enrolled in our schools inside Syria. Ten of our staff members have been killed in Syria and 21 are still missing, and about 16 have been injured. This is out of a staff of about 3,700, almost all of them Palestinian refugees themselves. Our staff has continued to do very exceptional work, often in challenging and sometimes dangerous environments. It’s estimated that more than 46,000 refugee homes have been destroyed and we had this discussion just before walking in here. It’s about half in many of the areas. Throughout Syria, reports indicate that there have been anywhere from about 500,000 to 900,000 homes destroyed, Syrians and Palestinians alike.

As I’ve mentioned before, 51,000 have crossed the border into Lebanon, adding to the more than 270,000 Palestinian refugees already there, which is an increase in about 20 percent. About half of these new arrivals have settled into the twelve existing Palestine refugee camps in Lebanon, which have placed some additional strains and burdens on the already fragile infrastructure and extremely difficult living conditions there. Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are legally barred in most professions and therefore have very little access to any economic opportunity. Many languish in substandard living conditions that are compounded by the prohibition of the ability to improve these conditions. So for a Palestinian refugee to flee from Syria to Lebanon, the situation they face in Syria must be truly horrendous.

For those who have fled to Lebanon, we’ve been providing a range of types of emergency assistance. Fourteen-thousand families who have crossed have been provided with cash assistance to help with the cost of food and housing. There are about 7,400 kids who are in our schools in Lebanon from Syria. In this particularly brutal winter, we’ve also provided winterization assistance to about 14,000 families from Syria. Well Lebanon has been generally pretty good about keeping the border open to Palestinians, there is concern over the increasing number of refugees whose visas are now expired and who are being asked to pay pretty exorbitant sums to renew them. Since August we’ve also been reporting the number of Palestinians who are being denied entry into Lebanon, something which we’re extremely concerned about and continue to follow up on with the government.

Turning to Jordan very quickly, the government has effectively closed the border to Palestinians. There are close to 11,000 Palestinian refugees from Syria who we’ve reported now in Jordan. Most of them reside in local communities and a large number of them live in abject poverty. Their precarious legal status creates difficulties for civil processes and access to services and employment. Women and children comprise about 75 percent of this population. In 2013 inside Syria, we distributed roughly 140,000 food parcels and provided cash assistance to about 90,000 families. In 2014 however we see these numbers going up quite a bit. We estimate we’ll have to provide emergency assistance to about 440,000 Palestine refugees. We’re estimating about 100,000 potentially in Lebanon and about 150,000 in Jordan, and 1,200 in Gaza. That rapidly approaches the 540,000 refugees total from Syria. So it’s a little over 80 percent, we estimate, of the Palestinian refugees in Syria are needing assistance. So in order to accomplish this we’re estimating we’re going to need about $417 million in 2014. $310 million, or 75 percent of which, we will be programming inside of Syria, $90 million in Lebanon and $15 million in Jordan. Of this amount, we estimate we’ll distribute about $250 million in cash assistance to help with food, shelter and non-food items, close to $60 million for direct food assistance, $18 million for emergency health, $17 million for emergency education, $20 million for non-food items and $3 million for repairs to our own facilities.

Overall though, the goal for our work in Syria in 2014 is to preserve the resilience of the Palestinian communities, provide a protective framework, and mitigate vulnerability and to strengthen our capacity to deliver humanitarian services. One of the strategies we’ve been pursuing as an agency inside Syria is to move from a facility-based approach to a beneficiary-based approach to service delivery, which essentially means that we’ll bring services to the population rather than asking the population to come to us to receive it. The largest program in Syria, for example, is our basic education system and as I mentioned, it’s been severely impacted by the conflict. In addition to using alternate facilities in areas where our schools have been damaged or destroyed or are inaccessible to students and staff we’re also introducing a range of innovative approaches to help the students keep up with their studies. Some examples of these include the development of self-learning materials that they can do at home, TV programming, we have a satellite station that we broadcast from Gaza and post to Youtube, and psycho-social support through 39 newly hired counselors. In addition, as previously mentioned, we’ve established eight health points, mostly in areas where Palestinians have fled to. They’re not full-fledged medical clinics but we provide them with basic primary healthcare services. Our services have always been about building for the future and continue to be about this in Syria. Vocational training, micro-finance, youth employment and leadership opportunities, community development, and women’s empowerment: these all continue and contribute to the improvement as well as eventual recovery.

Overall, as Nidal mentioned, the vast majority of Palestine refugees have been neutral and outside of the conflict but increasingly are being caught in the crossfire. One of the important messages that can inevitably be drawn from this tragic conflict is that more than ever the world needs to find a just and durable solution to the 65 year plight of Palestine refugees. Now just to turn a few minutes to Yarmouk in particular which is what we’re here to discuss, in the formal camp area, roughly 160,000 people have resided, mainly Palestinians in addition to about one million others, as Nidal mentioned, in the surrounding areas. Unfortunately, it lies on a very strategic route to Damascus. In December 2012 as was mentioned, insurgent groups infiltrated the camp and as a result the army surrounded it and the vast majority of the residents fled. Today, we’re estimating about 18,000 Palestine refugees remain besieged at the camp. And until just the last few days, we’ve had virtually no access to Yarmouk since September and very little access in the seven months prior. Apart from 2,000 polio vaccines that were distributed in December, virtually nothing or no one has been allowed into or out of the camp. Residents including infants and children have been subsisting for long periods of time on diets of stale vegetables, herbs, spices, tomato paste and animal feed. Infants have been suffering from diseases linked to severe malnutrition. Malnutrition is rife and dehydration is common and there have been widespread reports of death due to starvation. There are also reports of treatable conditions such as diarrhea leading to death.

Our efforts throughout the last several months have been hindered by the systematic closure of all the access points to the camp in the presence of armed groups since December 2012. Over the last few days however, we’ve finally been successful in bringing food parcels into the camp through the northern checkpoint. So far as of this morning, we’ve been successful in distributing 5,839 food parcels since 18 January. While this is still insufficient to the number of people who remain in Yarmouk, it represents real progress in a short period of time. In addition, just yesterday we were able to distribute 10,000 polio vaccines into the camp through the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, enough to vaccinate 3,000 children. There are also reports, as Nidal mentioned also, that a small number of people, mostly elderly and those requiring medical attention, have been allowed to leave the camp. We certainly applaud those involved in enabling us to gain this limited access to the camp over the last few days. This process demonstrates that access to Yarmouk and also civilians in Syria can be sustained and that given the chance, the UN can make a real difference to the lives of the people in Syria, babies, children, women, the sick, the elderly who have endured unimaginable suffering because of this pitiless war. We continue to call on all parties to the Syrian conflict to act in full compliance to their obligations under international humanitarian and human rights law to protect innocent civilians in Yarmouk and across Syria. Palestinians are increasingly facing an existential crisis and the situation in Syria only illustrates this too starkly. Facing dramatic violence around them, being besieged in their own communities, having few flight options available to them, Palestine refugees represent a particularly vulnerable community in the region. It’s for this reason that it is perhaps more important for the political actors and the international community alike to finally reach an agreement that will provide for a bright, stable, and sustainable future for the Palestinians.

Christopher McGrath is Senior Liaison Officer and Acting Head of the Washington Representative Office of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) where he represents the interests of the agency within the Unites States Government, including the Executive and Legislative branches, the American-based press corps, the NGO community, and the American public. Mr. McGrath also served as Information Management Officer on a USAID project in the West Bank and Gaza in 2005-2006 and as Operations Officer for the Iraqi Parliamentary elections in 2004-2005. Mr. McGrath holds a Master’s degree in International Relations from the Elliott School of International Affairs and a Bachelor’s degree in Government from Skidmore College.