Crisis in Palestinian Camp in Syria Has Worsened Since ISIS Invasion, U.N. Says

Somini Sengupta and Rick Gladstone, New York Times

6 April 2015

UNITED NATIONS — Relief officials at the United Nations expressed growing alarm on Monday about an unfolding humanitarian disaster in Syria’s Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp, which was invaded last week by Islamic State militants and their allies.

Roughly 18,000 people, including 3,500 children, have been trapped by fighting in Yarmouk, which is on the southern outskirts of the capital, Damascus, and is less than 10 miles from the presidential palace.

Pierre Krähenbühl, commissioner general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which administers aid to Palestinian refugees in the Middle East, said the residents are slowly starving.

He gave an emergency briefing on the crisis Monday to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the Security Council via video link from Amman, Jordan.

Speaking to reporters afterward, Mr. Krähenbühl, said the situation was “more desperate than ever for civilians inside Yarmouk.”

He called on the Security Council and all United Nations members with influence on the combatants to exert pressure on them to halt the fighting and allow the agency to deliver food, water and medicine to Yarmouk, which has been shut off from all outside aid for the past week and has been intermittently isolated for the past two years.

Residents have been subsisting on roughly 400 calories a day, he said, and need at least 2,100. He said their basic daily preoccupation now is “bare survival.”

The ability of the United Nations to intervene and help the people of Yarmouk, he said, is “a test of the entire international system.”

Yarmouk, once the biggest enclave of Palestinian refugees in Syria, has been increasingly entangled in the four-year-old civil war that has upended the country.

The invasion of Yarmouk by the Islamic State militants, who not only oppose President Bashar al-Assad but have also been fighting other insurgent factions, was the closest they have come to the capital.

Mr. Krähenbühl said there have been no talks between United Nations representatives and the Islamic State about access to Yarmouk. He also said he could not confirm reports by other Middle Eastern news agencies that Islamic State fighters had beheaded some people captured in Yarmouk.

He said “a few hundred” residents had managed to escape from Yarmouk in the past few days.

Christopher Gunness, a spokesman for the agency, said earlier Monday by telephone from his office in Jerusalem that Yarmouk residents were terrified of venturing out of doors.

“The situation in Yarmouk has descended into lower levels of inhumanity,” Mr. Gunness said. “There’s conflict raging in the streets outside. Things are as dire as they have been since the war began.”

On Sunday, the agency issued a statement imploring combatants in Yarmouk to halt the fighting. “We demand that all parties exercise maximum restraint and abide by their obligations under international law to protect civilians,” the statement said.

Wafa, the official Palestinian news agency, said Monday that one of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society’s hospitals in Yarmouk had been targeted by a missile, which wounded at least three medical workers and heavily damaged the building.

Wafa reported that the Islamic State fighters had taken control of 90 percent of the camp, “as gun battles continued to rage between this group and various Palestinian groups since last Wednesday.”

Featured Image: A man climbed a staircase inside a demolished building in the Yarmuk refugee camp near the Syrian capital of Damascus on Monday. Copyright: Youssef Karwashan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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