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ABTAA, Syria: The classrooms at a school building in Abtaa, in Syria’s southern province of Daraa, have turned into living quarters housing three or four families each. Because of the lack of privacy and close quarters, the woman and children sleep inside, with the men bedding down outside in the courtyard.
The Bedouin families evacuated their villages during sectarian fighting more than a month ago in neighboring Sweida province. Since then, the central government in Damascus has been in a standoff with local Druze authorities in Sweida, while the displaced have been left in a state of limbo.
Munira Al-Hamad, a 56-year-old from the village of Al-Kafr in the Sweida countryside, is staying with her family in the school, which is set to reopen this month. If that happens, she doesn’t know where her family will go.
“We don’t want to live in tents. We want the government to find us houses or someplace fit to live,” she said. “It’s impossible for anyone to return home. Just because you’re Muslim, they’ll see you as the enemy in Sweida.”
Conflict displaces tens of thousands
What began last month with small-scale clashes between local Sunni Muslim Bedouin clans and members of the Druze sect — who are a minority in Syria but the majority in Sweida — escalated into heavy fighting between Bedouins and government fighters on one side and Druze armed groups on the other. Israel intervened on the side of the Druze, launching airstrikes.
Hundreds of civilians, mostly Druze, were killed and Sweida has remained under what residents describe as a siege since then, with limited aid and supplies going in. Amnesty International reported this week that it had documented 46 cases of “Druze men and women deliberately and unlawfully killed,” in some cases by “government and government-affiliated forces in military and security uniforms.”
Although the fighting has subsided, more than 164,000 people remain displaced by the conflict, according to UN figures.
They include Druze internally displaced within Sweida and Bedouins who fled or were evacuated from the province and now see little prospect of going back, raising the prospect of permanent demographic change.
Al-Hamad said her family “remained under siege for 15 days, without bread or anything coming in” before the Syrian Arab Red Crescent evacuated them. Her cousin and a neighbor were attacked by armed men as they fled and had their cars stolen with all the belongings they were transporting, she said.
Jarrah Al-Mohammad, 24, said dozens of residents trekked overnight on foot to escape when the fighting reached their village, Sahwat Balata. Nine people from the area were gunned down by Druze militants, including three children under the age of 15, all of them unarmed, he said. The Associated Press could not independently verify the account.
“No one has gone back. There are houses that they burned and destroyed and stole the furniture,” he said. “We can’t return to Sweida — there’s no longer security between us and the Druze … And we’re the minority in Sweida.”
At a hotel in the Damascus suburb of Sayyida Zeinab that has been converted into a shelter for the displaced, Hamoud Al-Mukhmas and his wife, Munira Al-Sayyad, are mourning their 21- and 23-year-old sons.
They said the two were shot and killed by militants, along with Hamoud’s niece and cousin, while unarmed and trying to flee their home in the town of Shahba.
Al-Sayyad is unhappy in the hotel room, where she has no kitchen to cook for her younger children. The family said food aid is sporadic.
“I need assistance and I need money — we don’t have a house,” Al-Mukhmas said. ”I don’t think we’ll go back — we’d go back and find the Druze living in our houses.”
Few answers from the government
Government officials have insisted that the displacement is temporary, but have not offered any “clarity on for how long people will be displaced, what are the mechanisms or plans or strategies that they have in order to bring them back,” said Haid Haid, a senior research fellow at the Arab Reform Initiative and the Chatham House think tank.
Returning the displaced to their homes will likely require a political solution that appears to be far off, given that the government in Damascus and de facto authorities in Sweida are not even holding direct talks, he said.
Sheikh Hikmat Al-Hijri, a prominent Druze leader in Sweida, is calling for independence for southern Syria — a demand rejected by Damascus — and recently announced the formation of a “national guard” formed from several Druze armed factions.
Government officials declined to comment on their plans for addressing the displacement.
For some, the situation recalls unpleasant memories from Syria’s nearly 14-year civil war, when fighters and civilians opposed to former President Bashar Assad were evacuated from areas retaken from rebels by government forces. The green buses that transported them became for many a symbol of exile and defeat.
Intercommunal tensions now harder to solve
The Bedouins in Sweida, who historically work as livestock herders, consider themselves the original inhabitants of the land before the Druze came in the 18th century, fleeing violence in what is now Lebanon. The two communities have largely coexisted, but there have been periodic tensions and violence.
In 2000, a Bedouin killed a Druze man in a land dispute and government forces intervened, shooting Druze protesters. After a 2018 Daesh group attack on the Druze in Sweida that killed more than 200 people, the Druze accused the Bedouins of helping the militants.
The latest escalation began with a Bedouin tribe in Sweida setting up a checkpoint and attacking and robbing a Druze man, which triggered tit-for-tat attacks and kidnappings. But tensions had been rising before that.
A Bedouin man displaced from Al-Kafr, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of security fears, said that his brother was kidnapped and held for ransom in 2018 by an armed group affiliated with Al-Hijri. On July 12, a day before the clashes started, he said, a group of armed men came to the family’s home and threatened his father, forcing him to sign a paper giving up possession of the house.
The Druze “are not all bad people,” he said. “Some of them supported us kindly, but there are also bad militants.”
He threatened that “if the state does not find a solution after our homes have been occupied, we will take our rights into our own hands.”
Al-Sayyad, the mother of the two young men killed, also took a vengeful tone.
“I want the government to do to these people what they did to my sons,” she said.
Haid said that intercommunal tensions could be resolved with time but have now become secondary to the larger political issues between Damascus and Sweida.
“Unless there is some sort of dialogue in order to overcome those difference, it’s difficult to imagine how the local disputes will be solved,” he said.

NAPLES: Since arriving emaciated in Italy from Gaza, little Shamm Qudeih has celebrated her second birthday and gained weight on a new diet that includes a special porridge — progress welcomed by doctors treating her for severe malnutrition worsened by a genetic metabolic disease.
Just weeks ago, the toddler was all skin and bones as she clung to her mother in a hospital in southern Gaza, after months of being unable to get the food and treatment she needed because of an Israeli blockade aimed at pressuring the Hamas militant group to release hostages. Then she was evacuated to Italy for medical treatment, along with six other Palestinian children.
A striking photo of Shamm wincing in her mother’s arms, with her hair matted and ribs protruding from her chest, was taken by Associated Press freelance journalist Mariam Dagga just days before the child left Gaza on Aug. 13. It was one of Dagga’s last images. She was among 22 people killed in an Aug. 25 Israeli strike on the same hospital in southern Gaza.
More than half a million people in Gaza, a quarter of the population, are experiencing catastrophic levels of hunger because of the blockade and ongoing military operations, the world’s leading authority on hunger crises said last month. Gaza City, in the north, is experiencing famine, it said.
Toddler perks up
By this week, Shamm was sitting up, alert in a hospital crib in Naples, her fine blonde hair pulled into a high ponytail. She wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the word “cute.” Her wide eyes gleamed as her older sister and mother called her name from across the room, and she broke into a smile.
Weighing around 4 kilograms (9 pounds) when she arrived in Italy, Shamm was “in a serious and challenging clinical state,” said Dr. Daniele de Brasi, a pediatric genetic disease specialist who is treating her at Santobono Pausilipon Children’s Hospital in Naples.
She now weighs 5.5 kilograms (just over 12 pounds), which is still no more than half of the median weight for a child of her age, de Brasi said.
The doctor said “a big part” of her undernourishment was due to a genetic metabolic disease called glycogen storage disease, which interferes with the absorption of nutrients, particularly carbohydrates, and can cause muscle weakness and impede growth. The condition is primarily managed through a high-carbohydrate diet.
So far, “We are very satisfied with her progress,’’ de Brasi said.
A mother’s struggle.
Israel military offensive on Gaza has killed more than 64,000 Palestinians in nearly two years of fighting. The Gaza Health Ministry, which is part of the Hamas-run government and run by medical professionals, does not say how many were civilians or combatants but that around half of those killed were women and children.
The family was forced to move more than a dozen times, and Shamm’s mother, Islam, struggled to get her proper medical care, visiting many hospitals and clinics. Doctors suspected the rare condition but could not test for it, much less treat it properly. They sometimes offered antibiotics.
“It became worse as a result of the lack of food, treatment and possibilities,” Islam said in an interview with Shamm resting on her shoulder. “We have been displaced maybe about 15 times, from tent to tent. We walked long distances and, along the way, it was hot, and the sun was hitting us.”
For a while, doctors administered a special formula, but Shamm would not take it, having lost the habit of drinking milk after supplies in Gaza became scarce.
The UN warned last month that starvation and malnutrition in Gaza are at the highest levels since the war began. Nearly 12,000 children under 5 were found to have acute malnutrition in July — including more than 2,500 with severe malnutrition, the most dangerous level. The World Health Organization says the numbers are likely an undercount.
A final photograph in Gaza
It was at Nasser Hospital in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis that Dagga photographed Shamm for the last time on Aug. 9. During the visit, Shamm cried in pain in her hospital bed. Her arms, legs and ribs were skeletal, her belly swollen.
Islam had gone to school with Dagga, who visited the hospital, and remembered her fondly.
“She was always coming to the hospital to check on me and Shamm,” right up to the day of their departure for Italy, Islam said. “She stayed until the last step of the stairs to say goodbye to me.”
After arriving in Italy, Islam learned that Dagga had died in an attack that killed four other journalists.
“I was upset when I heard and knew that she had died,” Islam said.
Ongoing treatment
Shamm is among 181 Palestinian children being treated in Italy, according to the Italian Foreign Ministry. About one-third of those have arrived since March, when Israel ended a ceasefire with Hamas and imposed the 2 1/2 month blockade on all imports, including food and medicine.
Israel denies there is starvation in Gaza, despite accounts to the contrary from witnesses, UN agencies and experts. It says it allowed enough aid to enter before and after the tightened blockade and has allowed increased supplies in recent weeks.
In Naples, Shamm now has a feeding tube in her nose to ensure she gets the right mix of nutrients overnight. Doctors aim to remove the tube in about a month. During the day, she is free to eat solid food, including meat and fish. A cornerstone of her diet is the carbohydrate-rich porridge.
Her current intake is around 500 calories a day, which doctors are gradually increasing.
“In these cases, growing too fast can cause problems,” de Brasi said.
Her 10-year-old sister, Judi, was brought to Italy as an accompanying family member, and doctors began treating her after noting that she was at least three or four kilograms underweight, de Brasi said. She has gained two kilograms (nearly 5 pounds) and is in good condition.
With both daughters improving, Shamm’s mother is allowing herself to experience relief. But it is too soon to think about going back to Gaza, where Shamm’s father is.
“Now there is no way to go back, as long as the war is going on. There are no possibilities for my daughters,’’ she said.