Spokesman for the Iraqi Ministry of Migration and Displacement, Ali Abbas Jahakir, said on Friday, February 14, that his ministry had submitted a memorandum to the Council of Ministers, “that dealt with allocating money to cover the shortfall in the file of Palestinian residents."
In a statement to the Iraqi News Agency, Jahakir added that “the government continues to provide support to Palestinians in Iraq, whose number is estimated between 30.000 and 32.000 families in Baghdad and other provinces, and it decreased to 8,500 families as a result of unstable circumstances.”
According to Jahaker, the Ministry has borne the payment of rental allowances for 3 months and the number was only 230 families that were in poverty, while the United Nations has borne the expenses of the remaining months.
He also noted “that the Ministry was surprised this year as mobile monitoring teams unveiled that about 60 families are not covered by the care system.”
In November 2018, the Iraqi government had circulated a decision to strip Arab residents of some of the benefits and rights, such as stopping the disbursement of the monthly food ratio, depriving heirs of a deceased from his/her retirement rights.
In addition to imposing fees on education and health and denying them subscription to housing within residential projects.
The decision mentioned above included Palestinian refugees as Arab residents of the country.
This came in the context of implementing a previous decision of the Iraqi government to cancel all decisions taken by the Iraqi regime during the rule of Saddam Hussein, including Resolution 202 of 2001, which considers Palestinians residing in Iraq as equals to Iraqi citizens in terms of obtaining citizenship privileges and their rights, such as the right to Ownership, work, education, free medicine as well as obtaining ratio card items, with the exception of the right of voting, running for election or obtaining citizenship.
The decision aggravated the conditions of hundreds of families, especially widows, as they were deprived of their husbands ’pensions.
Palestinians that were affected by war operations were also excluded from benefiting from the War Victims Law, which was approved by the government in 2009.
It should be noted that, since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Palestinian refugees in Iraq have been subjected to massive killings and displacement by armed militias, and their legal status in the country has been blurred out due to the regime change.
Palestinian refugees’ current status is also because they have not been included as refugees by the successive governments in Iraq after the invasion.
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