Thousands of Palestianian refugees living on the outskirts of Damascus, the capital of Syria, are facing a potentially deadly typhoid outbreak in a community that has been caught in the middle of Syria’s bloody civil war.
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“Given the conditions in Yarmouk, we fear this is the tip of the iceberg”, he added.
Christopher Gunness, spokesman for the agency known as UNRWA, said its staff gained access to Yalda, an area east of the Yarmouk camp hosting displaced Palestinian refugees and Syrian civilians, for the first time since June 8 and established a mobile health point. “The particular vulnerabilities of Palestine refugees and their sensitive status in the region compound the already stark and violent devastation they share with Syrians”.
UNRWA said in a situation report that its medical personnel provided 211 consultations over the course of Tuesday in Yalda, including confirming six cases of typhoid.
Typhoid is caused by a highly contagious bacterium, spread from person to person by food and water that is contaminated with traces of infected faeces or urine.
Yarmuk was once a thriving neighbourhood of Damascus, home to both Palestinian refugees but also Syrians. Since fighting broke out, more than 90 percent of the camp’s population has fled; it has dwindled from 160,000 people to just around 14,000. “Never has the imperative for sustained humanitarian access been greater”.
On July 25, UNRWA said in a statement that it was planning to decrease its aid to Palestinian refugees, including those living in Gaza, due to a lack of funding from its global donors.
The capacity of the agency to sustain life-saving emergency interventions, whilst responding immediately to urgent developments such as the one impacting Yarmouk, is undermined by chronic underfunding for humanitarian interventions inside Syria.
Islamic State fighters attacked the camp in April but withdrew soon afterwards having largely defeated their rival, Aknaf al Maqdis, leaving the al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra as the biggest force in the camp.
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Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan and Iraq have taken in more than three million Syrian since the conflict began in 2011, and the refugee crisis has become the worst since World War II.
