PALESTINIAN REFUGEES DIE FROM HUNGER IN YARMOUK CAMP

Beirut, 9 Rabi’ul Awwal 1435/11 January 2014 (MINA) – A Syrian monitoring group said Friday it had documented the deaths of 41 Palestinian refugees in besieged Yarmouk camp, including women and children, as a result of food and medical shortages.

“Food and medical shortages have killed at least 41 people in the past three months in Yarmouk” in southern Damascus, which has been under suffocating army siege since rebel groups took control of it, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Of the total, 24 have died as a result of malnutrition. The rest died either because of a lack of specialized treatment or because of a shortage of medicines, Observatory director Rami Abdel-Rahman said.

According to the Britain-based group, which relies on a network of activists and doctors across Syria for its reports, three of the fatalities were children and 13 of them women.

“Among them was a one-day-old child who could have survived had there been incubators,” Abdel-Rahman said.

The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees has frequently warned about the dire conditions in Yarmouk, The Daily Star quoted by Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA) as reporting.

UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness Thursday described “extreme human suffering” in the camp, saying food shortages continued and that the absence of medical care had led to women dying in childbirth.

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Syria’s army has imposed sieges on several rebel towns and neighborhoods near Damascus and beyond.

The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Peter Maurer, meanwhile, also warned aid was not reaching civilians in Syria as he began a visit to Syria to assess the humanitarian situation and negotiate greater field access for the ICRC.

The ICRC president will hold talks in Damascus with a number of senior Syrian government officials and with the leadership and volunteers of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, the ICRC’s main partner in the country. Maurer will also be visiting people suffering the effects of the conflict to observe the situation first-hand.

“I am deeply concerned about the escalating violence and its impact on civilians,” Maurer said. “I am determined to press for greater field access for the ICRC and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent – in particular, to improve the impartial delivery of medical aid in besieged areas. Another priority is to ensure that our staff are rapidly given access to Syrian places of detention to assess conditions and treatment.”

Yarmouk was once home to some 170,000 people but tens of thousands have fled fighting in the camp.

Syria is officially home to nearly 500,000 Palestinian refugees, around half of whom have been displaced by the conflict.

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UNRWA condemns the denial of aid for Yarmouk refugee camp

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said on Thursday that the Palestinian residents of the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus are experiencing “extreme human suffering” as a result of the civil war that has been raging in Syria for nearly three years, according to the Arab news site Rai Al-Youm (Today’s Opinion).

Opposition fighters now control most areas of the Yarmouk camp, and for the past year, regime forces have placed the camp’s Palestinian residents under a strict siege. To make matters worse, UNRWA has been unable to deliver any aid since last September, and at least 15 people have since died of hunger. Middle East Monitor (MEMO) reports.

This week, another humanitarian aid convoy was prevented from reaching the camp. Rai Al-Youm cited Syrian state television reports, which stated that a convoy carrying aid for the 20,000 people currently trapped in the camp had been stopped by “terrorist gangs”, the term that Damascus uses to refer to all opposition fighters. The regime’s report claimed that: “terrorist gangs in the Yarmouk refugee camp opened fire at a convoy carrying five thousand rations of aid to those who are trapped in the camp, preventing it from reaching its destination.”

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However, UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness appealed to both the Syrian authorities and other parties to allow and facilitate secure humanitarian access to the camp.

According to Lebanon’s the Daily Star newspaper, Gunness explained that: “The profound civilian suffering in Yarmouk deepens, with reports of widespread malnutrition and the absence of medical care, including for those who have severe conflict-related injuries and… women in childbirth, with fatal consequences for some women.” He added that: “Residents, including infants and children, have been subsisting for long periods on diets of such things as stale vegetables, animal feed and cooking spices dissolved in water,” warning that residents, both Palestinian and Syrian, are experiencing “extreme human suffering in primitively harsh conditions”.

Last month, Gunness told Agence France Presse that at least 15 Palestinian refugees in the besieged refugee camp had died because of malnutrition since September 2013.

The Yarmouk refugee camp usually houses about 170 000 people, but since the civil war broke out, tens of thousands have left the camp to flee the fighting. The Daily Star noted that out of the nearly 500,000 Palestinians who used to live in Syria, nearly half of them have been displaced by the conflict, becoming refugees for the second time. (T/P03/E1)

Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA)