RAMALLAH, Palestine
The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) has relocated some 2,000 Palestinians from Syria's flashpoint Yarmouk refugee camp, a PLO official said on Sunday.
Ahmed Magdalani, who oversees Yarmouk camp in the PLO, said that his organization was conducting an emergency plan for Palestinians inside Yarmouk after Daesh militants seized parts of the camp over the past few days.
"The [PLO] plans on relocating as many residents as possible while working on facilitating the entry of food and medical supplies inside the camp," Magdalani told The Anadolu Agency.
He also said that he will visit Damascus on Monday to monitor the situation in Yarmouk from there.
Violence has flared up inside the camp, which accommodates tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees, since Wednesday when Daesh militants stormed it and clashed with Aknaf Beit Al-Maqdis militant group.
Yarmouk, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, is located in southern Syrian capital Damascus.
Around 166 Palestinian residents of the camp starved to death in mid-2013 when Syrian regime forces besieged it.
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 220,000 people have been killed in the conflict to date, according to recent UN figures.
Prior to the Syrian conflict, Palestinians living in Syria were estimated at some 581,000 – one third of which had been living in Yarmouk camp, according to UN figures.
However, thousands of Palestinians in Syria have fled to neighboring Lebanon and Jordan, while hundreds of others managed to flee to the Gaza Strip as the conflict between Assad's forces and armed opposition groups raged on.
