As IS beheads Palestinian refugees in Syria, Hamas slams ineffectual Abbas
After Yarmouk camp falls to Islamic State, rival Gaza-based terror group’s officials says PLO stopped caring about refugees
Elhanan Miller is the former Arab affairs reporter for The Times of Israel
Hamas criticized the Palestinian Authority Sunday for failing to help Palestinian refugees living in Syria, as the largest refugee camp in the country fell into the hands of the Islamic State over the weekend.
Battles at the camp, just south of the capital Damascus,continued to rage on Sunday between anti-Assad Islamists belonging to IS and al-Nusra Front — two groups labeled terror organizations by the US — and the Aknaf Beit al-Maqdis Brigades, a little-known Palestinian group comprised of some 200 fighters, according to the Jerusalem-based daily al-Quds. As of Sunday afternoon, IS had captured most of the camp.
“The role of the Palestinian Authority has diminished in managing the latest crisis,” Hamas’s representative in Lebanon Ali Barakeh told the Hamas-affiliated daily Al-Resalah Sunday. “This is contrary to the efforts made by the PLO in the past to solve previous crises in the camp.”
The Assad regime has intermittently besieged Syria’s largest unofficial Palestinian refugee camp over the past two years, reducing its population from nearly 150,000 to just 18,000. The UN has been unable to deliver food to the camp since April 1.
PA President Mahmoud Abbas has sent a number of PA delegations to Syria over the past two years, pleading with President Bashar Assad to exclude the Palestinians from the civil war raging in Syria since March 2011, but to no avail. He has even examined the idea of absorbing Palestinian refugees from Syria in the West Bank; an idea which he told The Times of Israel fell through after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded they renounce their “right of return” in writing.
On Saturday, Hamas’s external relations chief Osama Hamdan charged in a TV interview that Abbas and the PLO have “left the refugees out of their calculations.”
Meanwhile, Hamas’s political chief Khaled Mashaal was engaged in diplomatic phone conversations in an attempt to “spare Palestinian blood,” Hamas’s Palestinian Information Center reported on Saturday. It did not specify who Mashaal had spoken to.
Speaking to Mawtini radio station on Sunday, PLO official Ahmad Majdalani described the harsh conditions prevailing in the camp. The Islamic State, he said, has begun accusing Palestinian activists of apostasy and beheading them, hanging the severed heads across the camp. It has also imprisoned more than 75 children and adults in a local school.
“What IS is doing reminds us of its terrorist activities in northern Syria and Iraq,” he said.
Majdalani told al-Resalah that a high-ranking PLO delegation will leave for Syria soon to try and solve the situation with local officials.
Meanwhile, he said, the PLO’s talks with the Red Cross and UNRWA have allowed some 2,000 residents to flee the camp to nearby Damascus neighborhoods.
