Refugee centre ‘turned into death camp’ by Syrian forces

THE largest Palestinian refugee camp in Syria has been “transformed into a death camp” as Assad regime forces press ahead with a major offensive against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) fighters who control the area, the UN has warned.

The Yarmouk camp in southern Damascus has seen a week of intensive fighting as Syrian regime forces and allied militias attempt to crush one of the last rebel-held pockets of territory in the Syrian capital.

More than 5,000 civilians have fled the area in the face of shelling and aerial bombardment. Many of the civilians, both Palestinian refugees and Syrian locals, are now sleeping in the streets.

“Yarmouk was a refugee camp that had already been transformed into a death camp, and even in that state it has just experienced a week of really intense fighting,” said Christopher Gunness, a spokesman for the UN Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa), the agency for Palestinian refugees. “Things have become unimaginably brutal for the civilians there,” he said

There is no running water in the area, Unrwa said, and its last functioning hospital has been taken out of commission by bombing.

Before the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Yarmouk was home to around 160,000 Palestinian refugees – people who had been displaced from their homes in modern-day Israel during the 1948 war, and their descendants. More than 100,000 Syrians also lived in the area.

Fighting in the camp broke out in 2013 as some Palestinian factions sided with the Syrian regime and others with the rebels. The Syrian military placed the camp under siege.

Isil fighters entered the area in 2015 and quickly defeated other rebel factions.

The Palestinian refugee population of Yarmouk had dwindled to just 6,000 last month, according to UN estimates. It may now be fewer than 1,000, as people fled the fighting of the past week.