YARMUK: When Syrian authorities said they would allow returns to the war-ravaged Yarmuk camp for Palestinian refugees in southern Damascus, Issa Al-Loubani rushed to sign up and quickly started repairing his home.
Hundreds of former residents have already requested permission to go back to the settlement, home to 160,000 Palestinian refugees and some Syrian families before the conflict broke out in 2011.
More than 400 families have returned in the last few months because they cannot afford to rent homes elsewhere after years of displacement, the United Nations said in early November.
Loubani, who first left in 2012, is determined to join their ranks even if the windows of his wrecked apartment are still covered with plastic sheeting.
“Our flat needs major work, but it’s better than paying rent,” said Loubani, who has been living in a Damascus apartment with his wife and daughter.
“We still need electricity, running water, and to clear rubble from the streets” before moving back in, the 48-year-old Palestinian refugee told AFP from Yarmuk.
Syrian government and allied forces retook the camp in 2018 from the Daesh group.
But two years on, reconstruction has been slow and the scars of war remain visible.
The walls of Loubani’s building are pockmarked with bullet holes.
Neighbouring blocks have had their facades blown off or seen their balconies cave.
Some structures have collapsed entirely following years of bombardment and heavy fighting.
Loubani’s wife, Ilham, finds an old photo from their wedding in the rubble-strewn alley.
“That’s Umm Walid,” she says, pointing to one of the guests in the picture.
Founded in 1957 with tents for Palestinians who fled or were ousted from their homes with the establishment of Israel, Yarmuk grew into a bustling neighborhood.
In 2012, around 140,000 residents fled as clashes raged.
Those who stayed faced severe shortages of food and medicine under a withering years-long government siege.
IS entered the area in 2015, bringing further suffering to remaining residents until jihadists were forced out three years later.
This month, the Damascus municipality said residents could register to return to Yarmuk if their homes were structurally sound.
Some 600 families have already signed up, said Mahmoud Al-Khaled, a Palestinian who heads a committee that clears rubble in the camp.
But the civil engineer who grew up in Yarmuk said less than half of the buildings were currently safe for reoccupation.
The 430 families that have already returned despite difficult living conditions rely heavily on the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).
Around 75 percent of UNRWA’s 23 premises in Yarmuk, including 16 schools, need to be completely rebuilt, and all three of its health centers have been destroyed.
To compensate, the organization sends a mobile health clinic to the camp once a week and provides buses to transport children to schools in Damascus.
A month ago, Syrian Shehab Al-Din Blidi returned to his home — one of the few apartments in Yarmuk largely spared by the fighting.
Its cosy living room with bright paint and upholstered armchairs stands in stark contrast with the wasteland outside.
“If we had waited for electricity, water and sewage to return, we would have perhaps” had to wait for a year before coming back, Blidi said.
With little outside help, he said it was up to residents to fend for themselves.
“Reconstruction requires efforts from several countries,” Blidi said.
“In the meantime, we have to make do.”
The 60-year-old has managed to secure some electricity for his flat through a long cable connected to a power source beyond the camp.
With no running water, he buys large bottles from outside Yarmuk and stores them at home.
But for camp residents displaced to Idlib — the last major opposition bastion, in northwestern Syria — returning is nearly impossible.
“No one in the (opposition-held) north can register to return or even reach Yarmuk,” said Ahmad Khormandi, who left the camp when IS entered in 2015.
He and his family now live in a displacement camp in Idlib province near the border with Turkey.
The 43-year-old Palestinian told an AFP correspondent in northwestern Syria that he fears arrest if he returns to Yarmuk.
But even if he were allowed back, he said, returning to live in his home would be impossible.
“I don’t have the means to fix my house,” he said.
In Syria, Yarmuk residents plan return to war-torn Palestinian camp
https://arab.news/8z5dg
In Syria, Yarmuk residents plan return to war-torn Palestinian camp
- Hundreds of former residents have already requested permission to go back to the settlement
- It was previously home to 160,000 Palestinian refugees and some Syrian families before the conflict broke out in 2011
Syria monitor says 35 people summarily executed in three days
- Most of those executed are former officers in the toppled Assad government who had presented themselves in centers set up by the new authorities, according to the Britain-based monitor with a network of sources inside Syria
DAMASCUS: Fighters affiliated with Syria’s new Islamist leaders have carried out 35 summary executions over 72 hours, mostly of Assad-era officers, a war monitor said Sunday.
The authorities, installed by the rebel forces that toppled longtime president Bashar Assad last month, said they had carried out multiple arrests in the western Homs area over unspecified “violations.”
Official news agency SANA said the authorities on Friday accused members of a “criminal group” who used a security sweep to commit abuses against residents, “posing as members of the security services.”
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said that “these arrests follow grave violations and summary executions that had cost the lives of 35 people over the past 72 hours.”
It also said that “members of religious minorities” had suffered “humiliations.”
Most of those executed are former officers in the toppled Assad government who had presented themselves in centers set up by the new authorities, according to the Britain-based monitor with a network of sources inside Syria.
“Dozens of members of local armed groups under the control of the new Sunni Islamist coalition in power who participated in the security operations” in the Homs area “have been arrested,” the Observatory said.
It added that these groups “carried out reprisals and settled old scores with members of the Alawite minority to which Bashar Assad belongs, taking advantage of the state of chaos, the proliferations of arms and their ties to the new authorities.”
The Observatory listed “mass arbitrary arrests, atrocious abuse, attacks against religious symbols, mutilations of corpses, summary and brutal executions targeting civilians,” which it said showed “an unprecedented level of cruelty and violence.”
Civil Peace Group, a civil society organization, said in a statement that there had been civilian victims in multiple villages in the Homs area during the security sweep.
The group “condemned the unjustified violations” including the killing of unarmed men.
Since seizing power, the new authorities have sought to reassure religious and ethnic minorities in Syria that their rights would be upheld.
Members of Assad’s Alawite minority have expressed fear of retaliation over abuses during his clan’s decades in power.
White House says ceasefire agreement between Lebanon, Israel to continue until Feb 18
WASHINGTON: The White House said in a statement on Sunday that the arrangement between Lebanon and Israel would continue to be in effect until Feb 18, after Israel said on Friday it would keep troops in the south beyond the Sunday deadline set out in a US-brokered ceasefire that halted last year’s war with Hezbollah.
The White House also said the governments of Lebanon, Israel and the United States would begin negotiations for “the return of Lebanese prisoners captured after October 7, 2023.” (Reporting by Daphne Psaledakis and Humeyra Pamuk; editing by Diane Craft)
Arab League says Palestinian displacement would be ‘ethnic cleansing’
- Egypt earlier expressed objection to Trump's suggestion to “clean out” the Gaza Strip and move its population to Egypt and Jordan
- Egyptian President El-Sisi has repeatedly warned that any planned displacement would threaten Egypt’s national security
CAIRO: The Arab League on Sunday warned against “attempts to uproot the Palestinian people from their land,” after US President Donald Trump suggested a plan to “clean out” the Gaza Strip and move its population to Egypt and Jordan.
“The forced displacement and eviction of people from their land can only be called ethnic cleansing,” the regional bloc’s general secretariat said in a statement.
“Attempts to uproot the Palestinian people from their land, whether by displacement, annexation or settlement expansion, have been proven to fail in the past,” the statement added.
Earlier Sunday, Egypt vehemently expressed its objection to Trump's suggestion.
Cairo’s foreign ministry in a statement expressed Egypt’s “continued support for the steadfastness of the Palestinian people on their land.”
It “rejected any infringement on those inalienable rights, whether by settlement or annexation of land, or by the depopulation of that land of its people through displacement, encouraged transfer or the uprooting of Palestinians from their land, whether temporarily or long-term.”
After 15 months of war, Trump said Gaza had become a “demolition site” and he would “like Egypt to take people, and I’d like Jordan to take people.”
Moving Gaza’s inhabitants could be done “temporarily or could be long term,” he said.
Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023 both countries have warned of plans to displace Palestinians from Gaza into neighboring Egypt and from the West Bank into Jordan.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, with whom Trump said he would speak on Sunday, has repeatedly warned that said displacement would aim to “eradicate the cause for Palestinian statehood.”
El-Sisi has described the prospect as a “red line” that would threaten Egypt’s national security.
The Egyptian foreign ministry on Sunday urged the implementation of the “two-state solution,” which Cairo has said would become impossible if Palestinians were removed from their territories.
Canadian veteran released in Afghanistan after Qatari mediation, official says
- David Lavery is now in the Qatari capital, Doha, where he has undergone a medical assessment
DOHA: Canadian veteran David Lavery has been freed following his arrest in Afghanistan’s capital Kabul on Nov. 11 after mediation by Qatar, an official with knowledge of the release said on Sunday.
The circumstances surrounding Lavery’s arrest remain unclear. The Veterans Transition Network, where Lavery worked, said last year that he had frequently traveled to Afghanistan to carry out humanitarian work.
“Mr. Lavery’s release was secured following a request from the Canadian government to Qatar, asking for their support given their past experience as mediators in Afghanistan,” the official added, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Lavery is now in the Qatari capital, Doha, where he has undergone a medical assessment, the official said.
What to know about Israel’s ban on UN agency for Palestinians
- Replacing UNRWA, therefore, is seen as impossible, even though beneficiaries and NGOs have been searching for alternatives for weeks
JERUSALEM: As a law banning the UN agency for Palestinian refugees from operating on Israeli territory is set to take effect, the future of the vital services it offers is shrouded in uncertainty.
Israeli politicians have accused UNRWA of being linked to Palestinian militants, and in October voted to ban it. The order will come into force at the end of January.
Lawmakers have celebrated the legislation as a political victory, but it has raised questions about what would replace the work of the crucial aid agency.
UNRWA operates across the Middle East, particularly in Palestinian refugee camps.
The areas that would likely be affected by the Israeli ban are the Palestinian territories — the occupied West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.
UNRWA provides education, sanitation and health services, and has been the main agency coordinating aid during the Gaza war.
The legislation bans Israeli officials from working with UNRWA and outlaws its activities “on Israeli territory,” which under Israeli law would include east Jerusalem, occupied and annexed by Israel in 1967.
UNRWA has a large compound in east Jerusalem and works in the Shuafat refugee camp there.
According to Jonathan Fowler, a spokesman for the agency, 750 children attend UNRWA schools in east Jerusalem, while it conducts 8,000 medical consultations each year for patients who have no access to other options.
In the Gaza Strip, devastated by more than 15 months of war between Israel and Hamas, the agency employs 13,000 people and coordinates the humanitarian response for other organizations, which means it is regularly in contact with the Israeli authorities.
In the West Bank, UNRWA provides services for hundreds of thousands of people living in refugee camps.
To operate in the territory, the agency must coordinate with an Israeli defense ministry agency.
Under the Israeli law, UNRWA must cease its operations in east Jerusalem and vacate all its buildings by January 30, Israeli ambassador to the UN Danny Danon wrote in a letter to Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday.
Apart from that letter, “no one knows what is going to happen,” said Fowler.
“We will continue everything we can while awaiting further details. We are not giving up.”
Emphasising the uncertainty that surrounds the agency, Fowler said it wasn’t clear whether UNRWA staff passing through Israeli checkpoints across the West Bank could “be considered contact with the Israeli authorities” and therefore banned.
He said that during Israeli military raids, UNRWA staff have maintained contact with Israeli officials to protect the people it serves, especially children in refugee camps.
“If we lose that contact, that would be a big problem,” he said. “It is very dangerous.”
In the Gaza Strip, UNRWA “provides logistical support” for other UN agencies and remains “the backbone of UN operations on the ground,” said Muhannad Hadi, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator for the Middle East, recently returned from Gaza.
Replacing UNRWA, therefore, is seen as impossible, even though beneficiaries and NGOs have been searching for alternatives for weeks.
Human rights group Adalah petitioned the Israeli supreme court on January 15, in the name of 10 Palestinian refugees, arguing that the legislation banning UNRWA “violates fundamental human rights and Israel’s obligations under international law.”
Fowler said that “under international law, it is incumbent on an occupying power to ensure the well-being... of an occupied population.”
The Palestinian Red Crescent on Thursday said it “absolutely” rejected the idea of replacing UNRWA “despite ongoing attempts by various parties” to convince it to take on the UN agency’s work or receive funds that currently go to the agency.
It said “the most recent of these attempts was by the Israeli health ministry which sought to hand over UNRWA’s Bab Al-Zawiya clinic in Jerusalem to the (Red Crescent) in exchange for financial support — a proposal that the Society categorically rejected.”
Some have suggested that UNRWA’s mission be taken over by foreign governments or other UN agencies.
Some UN staff, speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity, said that their organizations lacked both the human and material resources to replace UNRWA.
Other UN agencies “don’t have the capacity, on the ground, to do the distribution like we do,” said Fowler.
COGAT, the Israeli defense ministry agency overseeing civilian affairs in Palestinian territories, has repeatedly said that it works with other organizations, UN agencies and NGOs to organize the humanitarian response in the Gaza Strip.
