Jerash Camp (Gaza Camp)

Jerash Camp was established on 3 March 1968, one of six “emergency” camps opened in Jordan that year for Palestinians displaced by the June 1967 war. UNRWA rented 0.75 square kilometres of agricultural land some five kilometres from the Roman ruins at Jerash and divided it on an orthogonal grid. The 11,500 refugees who arrived had mostly spent months in West Bank camps first, and many had already been driven from their homes once, in 1948. About forty-five percent traced their origins to Beersheba and thirty-nine percent to Gaza, with smaller groups from Ramallah, Jaffa and Tulkarm — a tribal, southern population whose kinship structures shaped the camp from the start.

Each family received a plot of ninety-six square metres — twelve metres by eight — and one tent for every six people. Between 1968 and 1971 UNRWA replaced the tents with prefabricated asbestos units of eighteen square metres, set in the corner of each plot, with no kitchen or sanitation: cooking happened in the open courtyard, washing in shared public latrines. Because Jordan enforced a one-storey rule, families expanded sideways, adding rooms at the front for the madafa, the guest room that is the centre of social life and, at night, a bedroom. The courtyards left between old and new rooms became the working heart of each household.

What sets Jerash apart is legal, not architectural. Most Palestinians in Jordan hold full citizenship; those who came from Gaza — which had been under Egyptian, not Jordanian, administration — do not. They carry temporary two-year Jordanian passports without a national identity number, and without that number they are largely shut out of the formal labour market, the National Aid Fund, university scholarships and the ordinary machinery of the state. They may use land inside the camp but cannot own it, which is why the camp grew inward and upward within its own boundaries rather than spilling into the town.

The result is entrenched poverty. UNRWA put the camp’s population at 31,000 in 2023, Jordan’s fifth most populous camp and, by common assessment, its poorest. Human Rights Watch has separately documented Jordan’s arbitrary withdrawal of nationality from citizens of Palestinian origin, a practice that has left thousands stateless. In Jerash, that statelessness was never withdrawn — it was the starting condition, inherited now by a third and fourth generation born in Jordan who are legally foreigners in the only country they have known.

Sources

• Jerash Refugee Camp (Gaza Camp) — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Stateless Again: Palestinian-Origin Jordanians Deprived of their Nationality — Human Rights Watch, 2010