Assad is starving Palestinians to death in a Syrian camp, and nobody cares

150,000 used to live in Yarmouk, now there are 20,000; Israel worries about the Golan, where Islamists control much of the border area

By Avi Issacharoff for TimesofIsrael

It’s been three years since the civil war broke out in Syria, and there is no end in sight. More than 120,000 people have been killed so far. Two-and-a-half million Syrians are refugees. The damage to the country’s infrastructure is estimated at $3 billion.

On the ground, a fragile equilibrium holds between the regime and its opponents. President Bashar Assad’s army manages limited gains in key regions, like the coastal area near Tartus and Latakia, and in major cities like Aleppo and Damascus. But the regime is far from defeating the rebels, and has, to some extent, come to terms with rebel control over certain areas, like the Kurdish region in northeastern Syria.

Assad’s opponents, for their part, continue to show weakness and fractiousness, as a motley assortment of groups — some radical Islamists, others secular — fight the regime and fight each other. The Syrian army today numbers close to 230,000 men. Facing them are 120,000 rebels, two-thirds of whom are considered Islamists — 10 percent are affiliated with al-Qaeda — and they’re all killing each other.

It is interesting to recall how this war started, with an incident so minor that no one would have paid attention to it if it happened today. A group of kids in the city of Daraa, near the border with Jordan, daubed some anti-Assad graffiti. Syrian policemen arrested the children, beat them, and took them to jail. The city’s residents demonstrated against the arrests, and from that point onward, the bodies began to pile up.

This week, too, and last week, and the week before that, shocking pictures came out of Syria, and it seems that everyone, even Syrians, has grown used to them. The killing of women, children, and the elderly has become a routine occurrence, so commonplace that the average news viewer in Israel and across the entire Middle East is no longer affected by it. Another village destroyed by aerial bombing, more refugees fleeing for their lives, more bodies strewn across the streets.

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