CAIRO, Oct 18, 2012 (AFP)
CAIRO, Oct 18, 2012 (AFP)
A United Nations official said on Thursday that Palestinians in Syria have been thrust into the violence there and called on neighbouring countries to allow them in like Syrian refugees.
Syria’s roughly 500,000 Palestinians “have been been thrust into the crisis since June and July,” Radhouane Nouicer, the UN Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for Syria, said at a Cairo press conference.
“We don’t know how that happened, and who is behind it,” he said.
“Many of them have been displaced like Syrians and we are trying to encourage neighbouring countries to adopt an open door policy with them, like Syrians,” he said, adding that he hoped Palestinians would not be forced out of Syria.
Syria’s Palestinians are refugees and their descendants from Arab-Israeli wars.
The UN’s regional refugee coordinator, Panos Mumtzis, added that he expected the number of Syrian refugees fleeing the bloody civil war to double to 710,000 by the end of this year.
Three-quarters of the refugees are women and children, he added. Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq were absorbing the bulk of the refugees.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), established to help Palestinians who lost their homes in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, warned last week that Syria’s Palestinians needed help.
The conflict between President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and armed rebels has killed more than 32,000 people since March 2011, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group that opposes Assad.
