The Dera‘a refugee camp is located within Dera‘a city, the capital of the Dera‘a province in the Houran region, south of the capital Damascus and near the border with Jordan. It is one of ten Palestinian refugee camps in Syria officially recognized by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The Palestinian refugees that it has accommodated arrived in several waves after the Palestinian Nakba of 1948. The camp has suffered greatly from the events that began in Syria in 2011; most of its residents were forced to leave and much of its infrastructure has been destroyed, including essential buildings and facilities. While some residents have been able to return, many more have could not afford to rehabilitate their destroyed homes.
Establishment of the Camp and its Demographic Makeup
Dera‘a Camp was first established in 1950-1951 within the city of Dera‘a to take in the first wave of Palestinian refugees who had just been forcibly displaced from their homeland in the northern and eastern parts of Palestine. At the time of its founding, the camp occupied an area of approximately 0.40 square kilometers. After Israel occupied the Syrian Golan Heights during the June 1967 war, the camp received a second wave of refugees from the Syrian city of Quneitra, which led to the establishment of a new refugee camp alongside the old one, called Dera‘a Camp-Auxiliary. When it was established, this new camp also took in approximately 4,200 Palestinian refugees, and the total area of the whole camp became about 1.3 square kilometers.
According to a census conducted by the Syrian government’s General Authority for Palestinian Arab Refugees (GAPAR) just before the outbreak of the war in Syria, Dera‘a Camp had a population of 13,000 refugees, out of a total of 26,800 Palestinian refugees who were living in Dera‘a province as a whole. In addition to the residents of this camp with both its old and new sections, this province included two other significant population clusters of Palestinian refugees: one in the village of Jilin in western Dera‘a, and another in the village of al-Muzayrib in the northwest of the province. While Jilin had only a few hundred Palestinians living in it, the Muzayrib community of Palestinians grew to around 8,000-strong, making up half of the village’s population.
Most of the inhabitants of the old Dera‘a Camp trace their origins in Palestine to villages in the subdistricts of Haifa, Tiberias, and Nazareth: Ijzim, Jaba’, Ayn Ghazal, Samakh, al-Shajara, Turʿan, Balad al-Shaykh, and Arab al-Suwaytat. Most of the residents of the new camp originate from villages in Tiberias and Safad districts: Samakh, al-Nuqayb, Mallaha, al-Hamma, al-Mawasi, al-Zanghariyya, al-Talawiyya, and al-Masarweh.
Infrastructure
GAPAR is responsible for paving and maintaining the streets and alleys within Dera‘a Camp and the streetlights. It offers essential services to the camp’s residents such as water, electricity, sewage disposal, and the telephone network. Garbage is collected and disposed of by sanitation workers who work for UNRWA and use vehicles designated for this purpose. GAPAR also provides these services to the Palestinian community in Jilin, whose settlement is built on land granted by the Waqf (Islamic endowments) ministry to shelter Palestinian refugees.
Buildings and Roads
Like the other Palestinian camps in Syria, Dera‘a Camp underwent urban development several years after its establishment, due to the increasing need to provide each family with proper housing, where each dwelling had its own facilities. However, the construction of these housing units was often characterized by unsystematic planning and organization. The buildings inside the camp are of varying shape; some of them are single-storey, and others are multi-storey with as many as five floors; taller buildings are usually inhabited by members of the same extended family.
The camp has one broad main street and other streets and alleys that are cramped. During the years of the war in Syria and the resulting destruction, building rubble and debris accumulated in these streets and alleys, and weeds started sprouting randomly out of the piles. They were not removed and cleaned up until some camp residents were able to return to their homes.
The Water Supply
Dera‘a Camp has problems with its water supply; its neighborhoods and alleys cannot easily access running water. Due to the poorly designed water supply network, the water pressure is usually weak, and the water supply is insufficient to meet the needs of the camp’s residents. During the war, water distribution lines in the camp’s southern section were severely damaged, and the drinking water became contaminated with sewage water. After the Syrian government regained control of the camp in 2018, the Dera‘a Public Corporation for Drinking Water and Sanitation repaired the main line that supplies water to the northern section of the camp in 2019, and residents were allowed to pump water two days a week. In early 2024, the corporation began implementing a project to dig a new water line to supply water to the southern section of the camp, which was partially funded by private philanthropists. This project was an initiative of the local community to ease conditions for camp residents, who had to rely on water transported to them via tankers twice a week at inflated prices, which constitutes a huge financial burden on them.
Sewage Disposal
The sewage network in Dera‘a Camp is considered dilapidated, with residents frequently complaining about sewage repeatedly overflowing onto the streets and alleys due to recurring malfunctions and a lack of regular maintenance. This problem has worsened after the residents returned to the camp; sewage pipes were destroyed or clogged with dirt and debris, and as a result sewage overflowed inside the camp homes and flooded the streets. Members of the camp’s community and local action committees have organized numerous cleanup campaigns, prompting the Dera‘a provincial governorate to step in and instruct the Public Corporation for Drinking Water and Sanitation to address the issue. The latter has replaced some of the destroyed piping and cleaned and unclogged the manholes in the camp. Nevertheless, the problem remains.
Electricity
There is a severe shortage of electricity in Dera‘a Camp, just as there is in all other Palestinian camps in Syria and even throughout Syria. One of the biggest problems left behind by the war was the damage to pylons for electrical lines. After the Syrian government regained control of Dera‘a Camp in 2018, electricians from repair workshops owned by the provincial governorate began repairing the damage and destruction that had affected power lines in the camp. In July 2019, the state electricity company laid new groundwire cabling to improve the electrical supply in the camp. The level of destruction inside the camp made it difficult to install transmission poles, and so three transformer substations were put into service to ensure the return of electricity to all neighborhoods of the camp.
Social and Economic Conditions
Labor
Dera‘a Camp was established on fertile land, and so a significant portion of its labor force joined the agricultural sector as farmworkers on farms owned by Syrians living near the camp. Another segment of the workforce works in various informal or freelance professions without fixed employment (e.g. construction work, carpentry, metalwork), as small shopowners, or as government functionaries in public sector establishments.
Camp residents complain about the difficult economic conditions they are experiencing, with unemployment in the community being widespread. Most families rely on financial and in-kind aid provided to them by UNRWA for their basic living needs.
Healthcare
Dera‘a Camp suffers from difficult health conditions due to the cumulative impact of a number of problems, the most prominent of which are the contamination of drinking water by sewage water and the piling up of garbage in the camp streets and alleys.
The camp has only one medical dispensary operated by UNRWA, which suffered major damage during the war. After the Syrian government regained control of the area, UNRWA rehabilitated the dispensary at the end of May 2022, with support from the Japanese government and the UN Habitat.
The UNRWA clinic is incapable of handling all the health-related needs of the camp’s residents, who often experience long waiting times for getting treatment. Therefore, some seek care from the government medical clinics in the nearby Hayy al-Kashef neighborhood in Dera‘a city. The Palestinian community in the nearby al-Muzayrib village has one medical clinic of its own that is also operated by UNRWA.
Education
Dera‘a Camp has six primary and junior-high schools affiliated with UNRWA that operate on a double-shift system for both boys and girls. The schools are named after villages and cities in Palestine: the Kafr Lam and Taytaba Girls’ Primary Schools, the Ayn Karim Girls’ Junior High School, the Kafr Kanna and al-Safsaf Boys’ Primary School, and the Tiberias Boys’ Junior High School. UNRWA also runs a kindergarten in the camp. The agency sponsors four primary and junior-high schools for the community in al-Muzayrib, and two schools for the community in Jilin village. There are no high schools in the camp, however, so students are forced to enroll in high schools in Dera‘a city itself to continue their education.
Before the war in Syria, Dera‘a Camp was distinguished for its high percentage of educated residents, with a significant number of them holding university-level degrees in various fields. However, the state of education deteriorated severely due to the war; thousands of students of both sexes were deprived of their right to education, as most schools in the camp proper and the Muzayrib settlement suffered either partial or complete destruction.
After the Syrian government regained control of the area in 2019, UNRWA embarked upon a project to rehabilitate severely damaged schools in collaboration with the Dera‘a provincial Directorate of Education. With the help of donations it received from the Saudi Fund for Development, the Japanese government, and UN Habitat, UNRWA was able to rebuild the Ayn Karim and al-Safsaf schools and to rehabilitate a building housing the Tiberias and Taytaba Schools.
The Kafr Kanna School achieved a 100 percent pass rate in the results of the national exams for the junior high level [roughly equivalent to 9th grade].
The Relationship of the Camp Dwellers to their Immediate Environment
Historically, the relationship between the people of Dera‘a province, located in southern Syria, with the people of the region of northern Palestine has been a strong one; the two regions have long been connected by commerce, as the agricultural produce of Dera‘a was in demand in the markets of the northern Palestinian cities. The residents of Dera‘a Camp have an extremely good relationship with those living in the camp’s surroundings, and there are many ties that link them together, such as intermarriage. This relationship between the camp’s dwellers and their noncamp neighbors has been especially strengthened by the large number of agricultural workers from the camp employed on farms near the camp that are owned by Syrians. Moreover, some Palestinian refugees have moved from the camp to Dera‘a and its suburbs.
Dera‘a Camp Post-2011
Among all the Palestinian refugee camps in Syria, Dera‘a Camp is considered to be one of the most severely impacted by the devastating consequences of the war. Nearly 60 percent of the camp’s infrastructure was destroyed, and close to 90 percent of its residents had to move away; many emigrated abroad. Even after stability returned to the camp, initially only a few dozen families returned. Then, the number of returnees began to steadily increase, until it totaled 3,700 refugees in 770 families. (These figures are from a UNRWA survey conducted in 2020.)
Given this state of affairs, the camp lacks the support usually provided by organizations working in relief and social services. The support available is limited to whatever can be provided by UNRWA institutions (e.g., the agency’s women’s center, a center for individuals with special needs and disabilities, a day care center). In 2022, the rehabilitation of these institutions’ facilities and infrastructure was started, and the Community Based Center was inaugurated in August 2023.
The Palestinian political factions had been active inside the camp prior to the Syrian crisis, but they no longer have significant activity inside the camp.