Linah Alsaafin reports: Mohammad Farid Yousef’s family has been detained at Cairo airport for almost a month. They left the Gaza strip in the aftermath of Israel’s recent 51-day invasion this past summer, which killed over 2,000 Palestinians and injured 11,000 more, creating widespread destruction.
Since the uprising in Syria began in March 2011, an estimated 191,000 people have been killed, including over 2,000 Palestinian refugees. Three million have been displaced, with refugee camps sprouting in the neighbouring countries of Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. A further 6.5 million are internally displaced, meaning that half of the Syrian population in total have fled their homes.
Prior to the ouster of former Egyptian president Mohammad Al-Morsi, Syrians and Palestinian Syrians could obtain a visa from the airport in Egypt, which encouraged a number to set up life there, until Syria was safe enough to go back to. Yet the 30 June military coup, the rising xenophobia and hateful media incitement endangered the lives of Syrians and Palestinians living there, forcing many of them to flee elsewhere.
Mohammad and his family fled the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus in 2013. They arrived in Gaza through the Rafah border crossing in April of the same year after a brief stop in Egypt, deciding that they could at the very least lead a dignified life in the coastal enclave.
“We had nowhere to go,” Mohammad, 29, told the Middle East Monitor. “I came to Egypt during Morsi’s reign with relative ease, but the negative attitude of the Egyptian people towards us and their exploitation made my family rethink our options. We found we had nowhere to go except Gaza, especially since travelling by boats from Egypt to seek asylum in Europe had not started then. It began in May, a month after we had already left to Gaza.”
The Palestinian refugee population in Syria had numbered around 600,000. Now, almost half have escaped the fighting in search of security and stability, but face heavy restrictions by various Arab governments, such as Lebanon, which has announced it will not grant entry to Palestinian Syrians. [Continue reading…]
