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After 15 months of watching their relatives suffering in Gaza, residents of the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus finally breathed a sigh of relief. The war in the besieged Palestinian territory was soon to be over.
“Hearing that the fighting will finally stop, it raised our spirits. We don’t have any work or money, but now we have something at least to make us happy, now you hear people laughing in the streets,” said Rbeia Abu Hmeida, 45, a Palestinian refugee who lives in the Yarmouk camp.
According to UN figures, about 90% of Syrians live in poverty – and Yarmouk’s residents are among the country’s poorest. The camp still bears the scars from battles with regime forces 10 years earlier, with stray dogs picking their way through the gutted buildings, most of which are uninhabitable.
Despite limited means, Yarmouk residents passed out sweets in the streets to celebrate the end of fighting in Gaza – with which they feel an intimate connection. As they watched the scenes of human suffering coming out of Gaza over the last 15 months, they recalled the intense battles between various armed factions and Bashar al-Assad’s army during the Syrian civil war.
Abu Hmeida said: “We used not to be able to cross this street; the regime snipers would shoot you. We couldn’t even get to the street to retrieve the bodies, so we would watch the dogs eat them, just like in Gaza.”
Residents of the camp see many parallels between their experience and those of their relatives in Gaza. As the battles in Yarmouk raged, Assad’s regime imposed a punishing siege on the camp, cutting off the flow of basic goods into the densely packed neighbourhood. Residents who did not flee grew rail-thin, eating grass and wild vegetation as food disappeared. Some people died of starvation.
Assad’s army systematically dismantled the infrastructure of the camp, cutting off the supply of municipal water and electricity. At checkpoints, soldiers would arrest people arbitrarily, putting them in prisons for years, where they would often endure torture.
“Helicopters would shoot our water tanks on our roofs, they would rip the phone lines out of the earth and steal the electrical lines so that they could sell them,” said Taufiq Youssef Falah, 60, a resident of Yarmouk who works transporting construction equipment.
Falah was arrested during the siege of Yarmouk by Syrian regime soldiers, as they suspected him of being a fighter due to his muscular frame. After three years in a detention centre, the labourer’s muscles are gone and he cannot grasp things properly with his right arm, a product of nerve damage sustained by torture.
In 2014, Amnesty International condemned the Assad regime for its bombing of civilian infrastructure, cutting off electricity supplies and using starvation of civilians “as a weapon of war”.
Ten years later, Human Rights Watch accused the Israeli military of using similar tactics in Gaza. A January report says the Israeli army “wounded, starved and forcibly displaced Palestinian civilians … and destroyed their homes, schools, hospitals and infrastructure”. Rights groups have consistently called on the Israeli military to allow much-needed aid to enter the besieged Gaza Strip and reach civilians, which it has prevented since October 2023, producing famine-like conditions.
“There’s no difference between the suffering in Gaza and the suffering we had here in Syria. I suffered just like the people in Gaza have been suffering,” Falah said.
The Assad regime positioned itself firmly within the “axis of resistance”, a loose coalition of Iranian-linked forces across the Middle East that includes Hezbollah and the Houthis, who purport to defend Palestine. As Assad became a global pariah, he claimed to be the victim of a global conspiracy motivated in part by his firm stance in defending Palestine.
Those Palestinians who lived under his reign scoffed at the idea that Assad was a defender of their rights. “Bashar al-Assad said he was with the resistance axis, that he helped defend Palestine. Ha! That was never the case. His whole behaviour was a contradiction,” said Falah.
Assad did not join Hezbollah in its fight against Israel on 8 October 2023. Instead, he launched renewed airstrikes in opposition-held areas of north-west Syria, claiming the Syrian opposition was backed by Israel. The aerial campaign displaced more than 120,000 people.
While the residents of Yarmouk spoke plainly about their happiness about Gaza’s ceasefire, celebrations on the whole were muted. There were a few posters of relatives who died fighting with Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, but few Palestinian flags in sight.
“Usually it is the Palestinian factions who would organise the parades and the celebrations, but [Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the dominant faction in Syria’s new government] has frozen their activities, so we’re not sure who’s in charge now,” said Mohammed Qubsi, 33, a former Syrian army soldier.
Uncertainty also persists about Israel’s intentions in Syria. In the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Assad regime, Israeli troops pushed into a UN-mediated buffer zone. Syria’s new authorities have called for Israel to leave the buffer zone and Syrian territory, in accordance with a 1974 deal between the two countries. The rebel forces, which are still forming a national army, have little capacity to confront Israel militarily. On Wednesday, the Israeli military carried out an airstrike on Syrian security forces, killing two officers and a local official.
Still, Yarmouk residents said they expected things in Syria and the region as a whole to improve with the ceasefire in Gaza. “I’m optimistic that things will improve, both in here and in Gaza. At the very least, morale has been raised,” said Qubsi.
