Among the rubble, Yarmouk's Palestinians search for a future in the new Syria

Yarmouk - Mohammed Abu Qusay will always remember the hunger. During the civil war, he and his three young boys would eat songbirds to survive, or radishes, and sometimes just salt and water.

“I lived through the whole siege here, me and my sons, when they were small. The regime bombed us with exploding barrels, rockets, missiles, shells,” Qusay told The New Arab, as he sipped tea in front of his small mechanic’s garage in Yarmouk camp, once the thriving home of Syria’s Palestinian refugees.

The devastation that surrounds him seems to defy human habitation. The shattered suburbs, a moonscape of rubble and cement dust, conjure images of Gaza, where Qusay’s grandfather was raised before he migrated to Syria during the Ottoman era.

But since the toppling of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime in December, some 5,000 people have returned to Yarmouk, where Qusay and his sons have already spent two years living among the ruins.

Together, they are hoping to pick up the pieces of their “little Palestine”. But as refugees and a minority group in Syria’s rapidly shifting political landscape, they are worried about how they will fit into the new order once the dust settles.

Over the past months, the new government in Damascus has dismantled Palestinian factions and political organisations in Yarmouk.

With no local leadership and no guarantees from the government on their future status or rights, the camp’s residents are growing increasingly anxious.

From Yarmouk's rise to its ruin

Established in 1957, Yarmouk camp housed many of the Palestinian refugees expelled in the “Nakba”, or catastrophe, during the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948.

Unlike in neighbouring countries, Palestinians were offered almost all the same rights as Syrian citizens, but they were not allowed to vote. And, despite a chequered relationship with the Assad family dynasty, the camp flourished into a bustling commercial district and the largest Palestinian refugee community in Syria.

A densely built-up area occupying about a square mile on the southern fringes of Damascus, Yarmouk was fiercely contested ground during the civil war. Intense regime bombardment with Russian air support drove out most of the camp’s 160,000 Palestinian residents.

In 2013, Assad laid siege to the camp, a famine set in, and the weakest of the few thousand that remained began to dwindle. Almost 200 people died in the ensuing months, most of them starved to death. By the time Yarmouk was reconquered in 2018 by Assad’s army, it had been reduced to a ghost town.

“We want those who harmed us to pay the price of the destruction,” Qusay said. “They starved us, killed us, including children. We had to recover children’s bodies in pieces, and we buried them in pieces.”

Almost two-thirds of Yarmouk’s buildings were damaged or destroyed during the conflict, according to the UK-based Action Group for Palestinians of Syria (AGPS). Reconstruction is slow and piecemeal, partly due to the rampant looting of building materials by Assad’s soldiers.

Those who can afford it have made minor repairs to their homes, but all are living without running water and electricity, and with scant support from the state or international organisations.

Across Syria, a population beset by poverty and the devastation of war is trying to get back on its feet. But Syria’s Palestinian refugees – about 450,000 in total – are also grappling with the uncertainty of how they will fare under the new government in Damascus.

Nine months after Assad’s fall, questions around their future status and rights as refugees remain unanswered. Nervous doubts spring from the alternatives. If it is full naturalisation as Syrian citizens, they worry this will come at the expense of losing their Palestinian identity, their right of return, and the few benefits they receive as refugees.

On the other hand, if they are not fully integrated, they fear becoming second-class citizens and a continuation of the repression they faced as Palestinians under Assad.

Compounding the fear and mistrust, news spread in July that Syrian authorities were altering the residency status of Syrian Palestinians to “foreign resident” on civil documents, though the government later attributed the incident to a technical error.

“It’s like being in limbo,” Musaab Balchi, risk analyst and founder of Miftah, an upcoming media project on Palestinian refugees in Syria, told The New Arab.

“There’s a lack of clarity from the Syrian government over the legal status and the future of Palestinian refugees … and the community feels anxious.”

Balchi, who is Syrian-Palestinian himself, added: “[Palestinians] fear falling into the cracks between all the major issues [in Syria] … because we have zero agency: neither economic, political, social, or military.”

Living with uncertainty in the shadow of Gaza

In a bid to establish a monopoly of force and to court US interests as Syria steers away from Iran’s sphere of influence, President Ahmed Al-Sharaa’s government has disbanded the Palestinian factions that remained after the civil war, some of which were allied with the previous Assad regime.

The leaders of groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) and other less prominent organisations have been expelled or allowed to leave to neighbouring countries.

But there are concerns this may leave a power vacuum, with potentially destabilising consequences. The now-defunct Palestinian factions used to provide services and aid in Yarmouk; without them, disenfranchised and unemployed youth may seek illegal activities to secure their needs, including joining criminal gangs or armed militants.

“We need to be very careful of how we navigate the power - and ideological - vacuum, left by the dismantling and banning of Palestinian factions in Syria … you could find extremist groups filling up the ideological gap,” Balchi said.

Another cause for alarm among Syrian Palestinians centres on Israel’s actions in Syria. Since December, Israel has occupied new territory in the Golan Heights and launched over 1,000 airstrikes, justifying it all as necessary to ensure its own security or to protect Syria’s minority Druze community. Syria has not retaliated.

Last month, and for the first time in decades, the first meeting between top Syrian and Israeli officials was held behind closed doors in Paris, mainly to discuss the de-escalation of tensions between Syria and Israel.

There was also talk of normalisation between the two countries, which would expand the Abraham Accords in line with US President Donald Trump’s vision of a “prosperous Middle East”.

Caught between conflicting concerns, Balchi says that Syrian Palestinians feel worried as they observe these developments, but they believe that some sort of deal, like a non-aggression agreement, may be necessary to ensure Syria’s stability.

After a decade of war, peace and a chance to rebuild are above all what Yarmouk’s residents desire.

Meanwhile, Qusay and his neighbours watch the scenes of Gaza unfold on their televisions with painful helplessness. It is all too familiar as they witness their ancestral home, only 300km away, being subjected to an Israeli blockade and a resultant famine.

Down the street from Qusay’s house, a middle-aged man who introduced himself as Abu Hamza sat waiting in the shade on a pile of breeze blocks.

“People here are tired. Their houses are gone. They want to live in peace … But Yarmouk is a symbol for the Palestinians, every Palestinian in this camp has his heart in Gaza,” Abu Hamza said.

He had recently returned home and, though not much of it was left, he was planning to stay. “I was born in Yarmouk, and I’ll die in Yarmouk,” he said.

Alex Martin Astley is a freelance journalist based in Beirut, covering conflict, foreign policy, and social justice issues

Follow him on X: @AlexMAstley