According to a statistical survey conducted by the Palestinian daily al-Quds, around 1,332 Palestinians refugees were killed as a result of the ongoing civil war in Syria. Among them are 149 children and 249 women. The survey was conducted by the correspondents of the news paper who interviewed over the phone a variety of sources inside the Palestinian refugee camps in Syria. This number is an approximation of the actual number of those who were killed between the beginnings of the civil war in March 2011 until the end of March 2013. Most of those who were killed are from al-Yarmouk refugee camp in the suburbs of the Syrian capital Damascus.
It is important to note that there are nine Palestinian refugee camps in Syria. Almost all of their inhabitants are from among those who were expelled from Palestine by the Zionist forces in 1947-48 and their descendants, in what came to be known among the Palestinians as the year of al-Nakbah, literally translated as catastrophe. Al-Yarmouk is by far the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Syria and elsewhere. Approximately 375,000 refugees live in this camp.
There are 59 Palestinian refugee camps where the Palestinian victims of the exodus of al-Nakbah and their descendants have been living since 1948. 13 in Lebanon, 9 in Syria, and the rest are in Jordan and in the Palestinian West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Few of them existed in Iraq before they were depopulated and dismantled during the American occupation of this country between 2003 and 2010, and few other refugee camps are in Egypt. The main provider for the livelihood of the Palestinian refugee camps are the United Nations Relief Works Agency, UNRWA, and the various agencies of the Palestine Liberation Organization PLO and other Palestinian Charities.
Various Palestinian leaders and human rights activists have been calling upon the Syrian regime and the Syrian militias of the opposition to keep the Palestinian refugee camps in Syria as neutral territories to no avail. Those Palestinians who were killed in Syria are victims of both sides.