In front of his eyes is the story of his father and grandfather engraved in his mind, after the regime's planes launched their first raids on the Yarmouk camp in 2012, although the place and time are different and the outlet is also different, but the result for the Syrian Palestinian Ammar al-Qudsi is the same. In the capital of the Palestinian diaspora, which is meant "Yarmouk camp in Damascus," he heard many stories that his father told about Palestinian alienation and the suffering with the occupation during the Nakba in 1948, so those stories came to his mind after he saw familiar events repeated in front of him.

The decision to participate

The Syrian regime did not exist when the Palestinians arrived in Syria, and the first laws related to their presence and their participation in public life as new children of Syria were not from the regime’s status, for the Syrian people were the ones who received the Palestinians .. This is what Ammar al-Qudsi said during his talk about the participation of Syrian Palestinians in the revolution.

Al-Qudsi justifies the matter - during his speech to Al-Jazeera Net - that "the Palestinians have lived equal in rights and duties with the Syrians since the Syrian Parliament approved the Equality Law in 1956, that is, before the Assad regime came to power."

And it affirms that the Syrian regime did not differentiate between Palestinians and Syrians, but increased its bombing of Palestinian camps to convey messages of friendship to the Israeli occupation, which the Palestinian people have suffered from for many decades.

Therefore, it was a duty for the Palestinians in Syria to participate in the people's revolution against the Bashar al-Assad regime.

One of the scenes of the Syrian regime’s bombing of the Yarmouk camp near Damascus (French)

Asylum and displacement

The Syrian regime did not differentiate in striking its opponents, regardless of their identity, affiliations, or place of residence. Therefore, the Palestinians did not escape the oppression of the regime forces, especially in the two largest Palestinian refugee gatherings in Syria, which are the Yarmouk camp and the Daraa camp.

Al-Qudsi, who was injured in the foot as a result of the regime's bombing of the Yarmouk camp, affirms that many Palestinian Syrians have been subjected to serious violations, whether by killing, torture or displacement. Palestinians and Syrians.

After the refugee journey that his family began more than 70 years ago, Al-Qudsi stood at a new crossroads, and he left the Yarmouk camp deserted after the regime's control of it, and began a new journey of displacement that landed him in the northern countryside of Aleppo, along with thousands of Palestinians who were living in The Palestinian camps in Syria, and the war deported them again to other Syrian cities, and some of them sought refuge in new countries.

This is how the Yarmouk camp became, so only 500 families of 150,000 Palestinian refugees returned to it (French)

The price of participating in the revolution

The Working Group for the Palestinians of Syria counted the killing of more than 4 thousand Palestinians since the beginning of the revolution 10 years ago, and the statistics - which Al-Jazeera Net obtained a copy of - confirmed that about 1,800 Syrian Palestinians are in the regime's prisons, including at least 100 women.

The group’s statistics also indicate that more than 300 Palestinian refugees have been missing since the beginning of the revolution. Commenting on this, Palestinian journalist Fayez Abu Eid says that “Palestinians were being tortured in the prisons of the Syrian regime doubly, under the pretext that they interfered with purely Syrian affairs.”

Abu Eid - an official in the media department in the Working Group for Palestinians of Syria - believes that an ambiguous future awaits the Palestinian refugees in Syria after the displacement, especially the children of the Yarmouk camp in Damascus.

He indicates that the number of Palestinian families who returned to the Yarmouk camp - which is considered the capital of the Palestinian Diaspora in Syria - is less than 500 families, while it was inhabited by more than 150,000 people in 2011, and the features of the Palestinian presence in Syria have changed during the past decade between destruction and displacement after Asylum, arrests and murders, which opponents of the regime describe as brutality that exceeds the brutality of the Israeli occupation.