Appeal by the Palestinian Community in Germany (PGD) for the lifting of the blockade around the Yarmouk refugee camp south of Damascus
The war in Syria, ongoing since March 2011, has so far cost the lives of around 1,500 Palestinian refugees, and the number of victims rises daily. Roughly half a million Palestinians live in the Palestinian refugee camps in Syria, especially in Yarmouk Camp south of Damascus – around 200,000 Palestinians are at home there.
The population of Yarmouk Camp, south of the Syrian capital Damascus, is suffering under an oppressive blockade. Since the beginning of 2013, civilians who want to leave the camp to procure food for themselves and their children have been severely restricted in their freedom of movement. In early July the blockade was tightened even further and the camp completely sealed off. Civilians are prevented from entering and leaving the camp; they are also forbidden from approaching the checkpoint at the camp's entrance. For five months now there has been no electricity, and the camp is being subjected to intensified bombardment. All of this has led to the first signs of a humanitarian catastrophe. There have been widespread cases of dehydration among infants, some of whom, like the girl Janna Hassan, have died. Janna lost her life because no infant formula was available and the child refused a wet nurse. This death is all the more terrible because the mother, who had set out to procure food, was forbidden from returning to the camp.
The camp is no longer on the edge of a humanitarian catastrophe – it has become bitter reality: food, infant formula and medications have been completely exhausted and no medical personnel are available any longer. All 70,000 remaining civilians in the camp are affected – Palestinians as well as Syrians living in the camp, most of them women and children, as well as destitute families who had fled there.
The information coming out of the hermetically sealed camp paints a dramatic picture of the situation. The residents trapped there are at the mercy of the fighting forces on both sides of the war. They are bombed, massacred and abducted. The fight against hunger and thirst has reached a dramatic and deadly state. People are feeding themselves on dog and cat meat. Meanwhile more than 40 people have died of starvation or thirst. And the catastrophe is worsening by the hour.
We appeal to the Federal Foreign Office and the German government, as well as to all organizations and especially to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which is responsible for the lives of the Palestinian refugees, to put an end to the blockade and arbitrariness in Yarmouk. We expressly condemn the suspicious silence surrounding the blockade of the camp and the idle spectating as a humanitarian catastrophe grows by the day.
It is the greatest disgrace that today, at the beginning of the 21st century, criminals are using hunger as a weapon to kill people – and this before the eyes of a silent world.
