The cemeteries of Palestinian refugee camps are always a compendium of history, even if only of the troubled journey this community has undertaken in their long quest for a state.
Yarmouk is no exception, and although it was as devastated as the rest of the enclave, one can still find graves as significant as that of Khalil al Wazir, known as Abu Jihad, Yasser Arafat's number two, who was assassinated in Tunisia by an Israeli commando in 1988.
Next to him lies Mohamed Zaidan, Abu Abbas, the founder of the Palestine Liberation Front, who met his end in Iraq after being captured by U.S. forces that invaded the country in 2003.
The one that no one can identify - perhaps due to the dark memories associated with his name - is that of Ahmed Jibril, leader of a Palestinian faction that gained a sad reputation for supporting the Assad clan's repression against community members who fought under Yasser Arafat's orders during the Lebanese civil war and later participated in the siege of Yarmouk. His grave was vandalized after Bashar Assad's escape last December. Someone broke the marble covering the tomb and wrote: "May your soul be cursed".
The graves that were not destroyed by bombings were blown up by Russian military - allies of Bashar Assad - who established a base in that same location starting in 2018. Israeli media reported in the past that Moscow's soldiers unearthed dozens of bodies searching for the remains of Israeli soldiers fallen in the Lebanon war and those of Eli Cohen, a famous Tel Aviv spy who managed to infiltrate the Syrian elite and was executed - after being discovered - in 1965.
But Faes Abdul Moati recalls that during the terrible siege suffered by the place from 2013 to 2018, they couldn't even bury the dead in the two cemeteries of the enclave. "We used the gardens," he points out in front of the so-called Palestine Park. "I myself buried a neighbor here", he says.
For the 68-year-old Palestinian, the images of Gaza broadcast on the few TVs observed in Yarmouk - where electricity or running water remain an impossible luxury - seem like a mirror of his memories.
He will never forget how the few thousand residents who stayed in this suburb of Damascus in the final phase of the siege - before the war, Yarmouk was home to over 1.2 million people, including 160,000 Palestinians - "collapsed on the street," broken by the lack of food.
"Here, just like in Gaza, they also shot at people approaching the regime checkpoint to collect humanitarian aid," he asserts.
Like the Israeli army, the regime, supported by paramilitaries like Jibril's, decided to crush local resistance by imposing a brutal blockade. In July 2013, Assad loyalists completely sealed off the perimeter and from then on, no assistance was allowed in.
"All other besieged places, like Homs or Ghouta, had tunnels or ways to get some food. Not here. First, we ate dogs and cats. Then we ate herbs," he explains.
A cleric sympathetic to the opposition, Salah al-Khatib, even issued a religious edict justifying the consumption of these pets.
"I weighed 120 kilos and lost 60," Moati adds. All Palestinians who went through that experience recount the weight they lost by dozens of kilos. And they all agree with Abu Raed, 57, who is firm: "Bashar Assad and Benjamin Netanyahu are the same".
Dozens and dozens of people died of hunger. According to Amnesty International, between July 2013 and February 2014 alone, nearly 145 people died from this cause, including numerous babies and children. The siege was immortalized by a 2014 photo showing a crowd crowded among the rubble awaiting unlikely humanitarian aid.
Yarmouk remains a pure ruin. A succession of empty, hole-ridden cement structures that a few have returned to. According to the Action Group for Palestinians in Syria, 60% of the buildings were damaged or completely destroyed during the conflict. Only the area controlled precisely by Jibril's militia was spared.
The Yarmouk Community Development Committee estimates that the mountains of rubble that stretch along the area could fill 40 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Here, the most resilient - people like Moati - hide the debris accumulating next to their homes with cloths that serve as curtains. Moati has only been able to rehabilitate two rooms and a small kitchen.
Although it is in the past, the Yarmouk case has enormous significance in the present, as last July a German court opened a case against five Palestinians who were members of a faction allied with the Assad regime and a former member of the Syrian secret services, accusing them of using hunger as a weapon of war, in what German expert Rosa Lauterbach described as a "historic trial" as it is a unique case worldwide.
"This case provides the German Attorney General's Office with the opportunity to join the momentum generated by the proceedings before the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is currently prosecuting its first case of famine in Gaza," wrote Lauterbach herself.
"The experiences of Yarmouk reveal alarming parallels with the present: even today in Gaza, humanitarian aid structures are deliberately destroyed, supply routes are cut off, and the civilian population is threatened by the deprivation of essential resources. Using hunger as a weapon, whether in Yarmouk or in Gaza, is a war crime," echoed Andreas Schüller, Head of International Crimes at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR).
The famine currently facing Gaza, due to the suffocating blockade imposed by the Israeli army, has been a repeated tragedy in the troubled history of the Palestinian people since they suffered the first catastrophe in 1947 and 1948, following the creation of the State of Israel.
Israeli troops seem to have simply copied the devastating tactics used by Bashar Assad's army or those applied by the Shia militias of Amal when they decided to starve the Palestinians living in camps in Beirut like Burj al Barajneh, Sabra, or Shatila.
Remembering what happened in what was called "the war of the camps," which took place in Lebanon between 1985 and 1987, remains a taboo among some Palestinians living in Burj al Barajneh. "With what is happening in Gaza, it is not the time to remember that history," says a resident of that place.
But Nadia Lubani, 57, emphasizes precisely that she and the thousands of Palestinians who were besieged in Burj al Barajneh for almost two years "perfectly understand" what the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip are facing. "We have suffered that same hunger", she points out.
But Nadia Lubani, 57, emphasizes that she and the thousands of Palestinians who were surrounded by Burj al-Barajneh for nearly two years "fully understand" what the residents of the Strip face. "We have suffered that same hunger," she notes.
Lubani's recollection constitutes another encyclopedia of horror. Before the siege of Burj al-Barajneh, the Palestinian woman had to deal with pieces of corpses, snipers, car bombs, and bonfires to ward off rats trying to bite them while living among the ruins. She and her family survived the massacre at the Tel Zaatar camp—which was completely razed in 1986—and later the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982.
"During the siege of Burj al-Barajneh, we fed the children cats. We told them they were rabbits," she recalls. As in Yarmouk, grass and rats were also part of their meager diet.
Dozens of women—76, according to Lubani—were killed by Amal gunmen as they ran out of the camp each morning on suicidal expeditions to try to gather some food. They nicknamed it "the passage of death."
"We Palestinians have always been victims of everyone: Arabs, Jews... You can't imagine how angry I am with everyone. All those who championed these human rights after World War II and who have now allowed Israel to commit this genocide live. And who even enjoys what they're doing," he says from his Lebanese home.
"The world has descended into the law of the jungle. Gaza marks the end of years of transition in that sense," says Mohamed Ziara, a young Palestinian doctor from Gaza who was evacuated to Lebanon.
The few thousand Yarmouk residents who have returned and settled among the concrete remains of what once served as homes remain hopeful. The Yarmouk Community Development Committee estimates that 28,000 people have returned, 8,000 of them Palestinians. "The return [to Palestine] is a fact," reads one of the few graffiti visible in the camp. "There are no walls to paint graffiti on. Everything is destroyed," Faes Abdul Moati comments sarcastically.