Yarmouk Camp

Yarmouk was built in 1954 and 1955, when Palestinian refugees who had been sheltering in the mosques, schools and hospitals of Damascus — in Sheikh Muhyiddin, Rukniddin, al-Amin and Mezze — were moved to a new residential area south of the city centre. The General Administration for Palestine Arab Refugees, GAPAR, established under Syrian law 450 of 25 January 1949, rented 2.1 square kilometres from the al-Hakim and al-Mahayni families; the Palestinian researcher Ali Badran records that al-Hajj Amin al-Husseini gave the camp its name during a visit in the summer of 1954.

Its people came from Haifa, Acre, Lydda, Baysan, Nazareth, Tiberias, Nablus, Gaza and the Jordan Valley. Most were refugees of 1948, some 85,000 of them; another 63,000 arrived in waves — from Lebanon and the demilitarised border zones in the 1950s, from the West Bank and Gaza after June 1967, from Jordan after the fighting of 1970 and 1971, from Lebanon after the Israeli invasion of 1982. GAPAR allotted each family a plot four metres by ten, and UNRWA paid 300 Syrian pounds a room, later three bags of cement and ten reinforcing bars. The camp grew along two parallel lines that became Yarmouk Street and Palestine Street, and its neighbourhoods took the names of the places people had lost: Haifa, Lubya, Safad, Jerusalem, Acre.

Palestinians in Syria held a status unusual in the Arab world. Law 260 of 10 July 1956 gave them equality with Syrian citizens in employment, business, military service and government office while preserving their Palestinian nationality; they could not vote or stand for office. That relative integration, and Yarmouk’s size, made the camp something more than a camp — a city within Damascus with its own municipal committee, every Palestinian faction, publishing houses, theatres and markets. UNRWA never classified it as an official camp, and so provides all services there except refuse collection.

Before 2011 the camp and the districts around it held about 1.2 million people, including some 160,000 Palestinian refugees. The Syrian war destroyed that world: some 160,000 Palestinians were forced to flee Yarmouk over the ten years of the war, and those who remained were subjected to a siege and a famine that killed dozens. Fighting, aerial bombardment and the Islamic State’s seizure of the camp reduced most of it to rubble; in November 2018 the Syrian cabinet transferred the powers of the camp’s local committee to the Damascus governorate. Return has been slow, partial and, for many of the displaced, unaffordable.

Sources

• Yarmouk Refugee Camp — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• ‘Afraid of return’: Palestinians fearful of life in Yarmouk camp — Al Jazeera, 30 March 2021