PLO to hold talks with Syria on Yarmouk relief

A senior Palestinian official said Monday he was headed to Damascus for talks on helping residents inside the Yarmouk refugee camp, parts of which have been overrun by the Islamic State group.

Hundreds of families have been evacuated from the camp in a southern neighborhood of Damascus after IS jihadists launched an attack on Wednesday.

Palestinian forces inside Yarmouk are largely surrounded by IS fighters who have captured large parts of the camp.

Ahmed Majdalani, an official with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), told AFP that he would discuss with Syrian officials “ways to offer help to our people in the Yarmouk camp.”

In a statement, the PLO called for “all sides to immediately agree to protect the camp from efforts to turn it into a battlefield.” It also called for civilians to have access to relief corridors and to humanitarian and medical assistance.

Majdalani accused IS fighters of “seeking to control the whole camp” and to use it “as a springboard for attacks on the Syrian capital Damascus because of its strategic location.”

Since the jihadist advance began, regime forces have pounded the camp with shells and barrel bombs, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group.

“We don’t need to turn our people into human shields and pay the price for a fight that they have no role in,” Majdalani told AFP.

Arab Israeli lawmaker Ahmad Tibi on Monday called the Islamic State takeover of the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp “a crime against humanity.” Tibi, a member of the Joint (Arab) List party, said the international community, and Arab countries specifically, bear responsibility for allowing the violence in Yarmouk to occur.

“I feel anger and great sadness about what is happening in what is left of the camp,” he said. “There is a moral double standard. If other people were the victims, not Palestinians, it would be different.” Tibi said. Yarmouk is “another case where the refugees who suffered in the Nakba of 1948 are now suffering again.” Nakba is the term commonly used by Palestinians to refer to the catastrophe that befell them when Israel came into existence in 1948 and 760,000 refugees fled the country or were forced into exile.

On Sunday, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah called on the sides not to drag the Palestinian refugees in Yarmouk into Syria’s conflict. “We announced more than four years ago that we have not interfered in the internal affairs of any Arab country and therefore we reject any interference in our affairs,” Abbas said during the dedication of a public garden. “We have no relations with what is going on in Syria.”

Dozens of Hamas and Islamic Jihad supporters protested in the Gaza Strip on Monday to demand an end to the violence in Yarmouk.

“We demand the attackers immediately stop their killing,” former Hamas justice minister Mohamed Faraj al-Ghul told protesters outside the parliament building in the Gaza Strip. Yarmouk “must be a neutral place, far from the madness of war,” he said, urging an international intervention to “stop the killing.”

Yarmouk was once a thriving neighborhood home to 160,000 Palestinian refugees and Syrians but has been caught up in the country’s civil unrest which began in 2011.

It has been besieged by regime forces for more than a year and only about 18,000 residents are estimated to remain in the camp after many fled the fighting.

IS, which has seized control of large parts of Syria and Iraq, has fought not only against President Bashar Assad’s regime but also against other rebel groups as it seeks to expand the territory under its control.

JTA contributed to this report.