Damascus Countryside – Action Group
A number of Palestinian families have returned to the Khan al-Shih refugee camp, southwest of the capital, Damascus, following the fall of the Syrian regime. This followed years of forced displacement and displacement imposed by the war in the country since 2011.Â
According to statistics issued by the Palestine Development Agency, forty families have returned to the camp, including ten families who came from Lebanon, and thirty families who had previously been displaced to northern Syria, specifically to Idlib Governorate.
This development comes more than a decade after these families left the camp, particularly during the years that witnessed an escalation in the intensity of military operations, particularly the shelling that targeted civilian homes and farms surrounding the camp in 2013, in addition to the forced displacement that took place in 2016, which particularly affected the camp’s residents involved in the revolutionary movement, amid deteriorating security and living conditions at the time.
It’s worth noting that Khan al-Shih camp, before the outbreak of the Syrian revolution, housed more than 23,000 Palestinian refugees. It is one of the largest and oldest Palestinian camps in the Damascus countryside, and holds a special symbolic significance in the history of the Palestinian diaspora in Syria.