The Assad regime destroyed the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp south of Damascus [Getty]
The New Arab’s Arabic-language sister site Al-Araby Al-Jadeed has obtained a list of Palestinians disappeared in the prisons of the Assad regime.
The list was drawn up by the families of the disappeared and given to the Palestinian embassy in Damascus after it called on relatives to contact it so it could document them.
The Palestinian embassy said it would then pass on their names to the new Syrian authorities, so they can find information about them.
The list contains 1,794 names and is available in Arabic on Al-Araby Al-Jadeed’s website.
Last December, the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) said that 112,414 out of a total of 136,614 individuals recorded as detained or forcibly disappeared by the regime were most likely dead.
The Palestinian embassy had previously faced criticism for what was perceived as its inaction over missing Palestinians among Syria’s forcibly disappeared.
It responded by saying it did not have a database of those missing and called on Palestinians to provide names.
In 2011, when the Syrian conflict broke out, there were 526,744 Palestinians in Syria, most of them the descendants of Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in 1948. Since then, the number has dropped as many fled Syria’s war.
Most of the names on the list are of Palestinian residents, but they also include Palestinians from the Gaza Strip as well as those resident in Jordan and Lebanon.
The vast majority of the disappeared were detained by the regime after the Syrian conflict broke out in 2011, mostly at checkpoints and particularly around the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp south of Damascus which was subjected to a starvation siege by the Assad regime after it was taken over by opposition forces.
However, the list also includes people like Salim Hafez Salim, a Jordanian Palestinian detained by the regime in 1976. Hafez al-Assad took power following a coup in Syria in 1970 and was succeeded by his son Bashar in 2000.
Until it was ousted by a rebel offensive in December 2024, the Assad regime ruled Syria with an iron fist, detaining, torturing and disappearing political opponents and massacring civilians who protested against its rule.
