CAIRO
At least 990 Palestinian refugees have been killed throughout nearly four years of conflict in Syria, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) said on Sunday.
The announcement came during a conference on Palestinian refugees' affairs at the Arab League's Cairo headquarters.
Representatives for the refugees' affairs committee of the Ramallah-based PLO said that the organization had documented 990 Palestinian fatalities since the start of the Syrian uprising-turned-civil war in early 2011.
They also said that other Palestinian refugees in Syria had also gone missing since the onset of the conflict.
They went on to say that many Palestinians in Syria had been subjected to forced displacement and that the conditions of Palestinian refugees in Syria have greatly deteriorated since the 2012 attack by armed groups on the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus which hosts tens of thousands of Palestinians.
Prior to the Syrian conflict, Palestinians living in Syria were estimated at some 581,000, a third of which had been living in the Yarmouk camp, according to UN figures.
However, thousands of Palestinians in Syria had fled to neighboring Lebanon and Jordan and hundreds of others managed to flee to the Gaza Strip as the conflict between Bashar al-Assad's regime forces and armed opposition groups raged on.
Syria has been ravaged by a deadly civil war since 2011, when the regime of President Bashar al-Assad violently cracked down on anti-government demonstrations.
More than 190,000 people have been killed in the conflict to date, according to recent UN figures.
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