One of the pictures and videos circulating on social media documenting the looting of Yarmouk by the Syrian regime forces. Source: Facebook/Yarmouk camp newsOn 16 July 1948, several units of the Israeli army, backed by the navy, occupied al-Tira, a Palestinian village on the western slopes of Mount Carmel in the Haifa District. The fall of al-Tira came after more than two months of siege and bombardment by Zionist militias met with fierce resistance by local Palestinian fighters.
During the two months of fighting, most of al-Tira's residents, numbering just over 6,000 at the start of 1948, were displaced or forced to flee. Among those displaced by Zionist militias was 15-year-old Dhahabiyeh Abu Rashed. The teenage girl and her family fled to Syria before moving into the newly built Yarmouk refugee camp.
Established by Syrian authorities in 1957 to accommodate the Palestinian refugees scattered across Syria, Yarmouk quickly morphed into a microcosm of the Palestine that once was. In that overcrowded space on the southern outskirts of Damascus, refugees reimagined their forbidden homeland and rebuilt it from scratch. They named the neighborhoods after their ethnically cleansed villages and preserved their eclectic native accents. They kept alive the struggle for Palestinian liberation and created a rich legacy of resistance and communal solidarity.
