This hypocrisy is no surprise. The “Palestinian” refugee problem has been an artificial, manufactured crisis all along, starting from the moment when all the Arab states except Jordan refused to grant citizenship to the “Palestinians,” preferring instead to use them as a stick with which to beat Israel. They’re the first people whose refugee status is passed down to children and grandchildren, decades after the real refugees in Europe and central Asia found homes and got on with their lives.
“Hamas, PA reportedly refuse to take in Palestinian refugees from Syria,” by Michal Shmulovich for the Times of Israel, January 3 (thanks to Jerk Chicken):
Hamas and the Palestinian Authority rejected the United Nations” request that they take in Palestinian refugees who fled Syria during the ongoing brutal civil war, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Thursday.
Finding themselves increasingly isolated, some 150,000 Palestinian refugees in Syria “” there are approximately 350,000 in total in the country “” were forced to flee the Yarmouk refugee camp located outside Damascus due to attacks, including an aerial bombardment, by the Bashar Assad regime. Their flight has created a humanitarian crisis in Damascus; others have fled to Lebanon and Jordan, reportedly causing those countries to become increasingly hostile to their presence there.
According to the report, head of Hamas in Gaza Ismail Haniyeh told UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, that the Gaza Strip couldn’t take in Syria’s Palestinian refugees due to an ideological issue: If they take in the refugees from Syria, Israel could use it against them when it comes to the Palestinians” demand for the “right to return” to villages inside present day Israel, by pointing out that the refugees no longer need to return to Israel because they have been relocated to new homes in the Gaza Strip….