Souf Camp is a Palestinian refugee camp situated nearby the town of Souf

Souf

Souf is a City in Jordan, set over a series of mountains at an altitude of 1,000 meters. Souf is situated 35 miles north of Amman the capital of Jordan. The total population of Souf exceeds 25,000 people, while it covers a wide area of agricultural land considered the widest in Jerash...

 and the city of Jerash

Jerash

Jerash, the Gerasa of Antiquity, is the capital and largest city of Jerash Governorate , which is situated in the north of Jordan, north of the capital Amman towards Syria...

 in Jordan

Jordan

Jordan , officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan , Al-Mamlaka al-Urduniyya al-Hashemiyya) is a kingdom on the East Bank of the River Jordan. The country borders Saudi Arabia to the east and south-east, Iraq to the north-east, Syria to the north and the West Bank and Israel to the west, sharing...

. According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), there was 21,900 people living in the camp in 2005, of which 20,530 were registered refugees.

History

Souf Camp is one of the six emergency camps set up in Jordan for Palestinian refugee

Palestinian refugee

Palestinian refugees or Palestine refugees are the people and their descendants, predominantly Palestinian Arabic-speakers, who fled or were expelled from their homes during and after the 1948 Palestine War, within that part of the British Mandate of Palestine, that after that war became the...

s fleeing the West Bank

West Bank

The West Bank ) of the Jordan River is the landlocked geographical eastern part of the Palestinian territories located in Western Asia. To the west, north, and south, the West Bank shares borders with the state of Israel. To the east, across the Jordan River, lies the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan...

 from incoming Israel

Israel

The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

i forces during the Six-Day War

Six-Day War

The Six-Day War , also known as the June War, 1967 Arab-Israeli War, or Third Arab-Israeli War, was fought between June 5 and 10, 1967, by Israel and the neighboring states of Egypt , Jordan, and Syria...

 in June 1967. Most of the refugees were 1948 refugees from Bayt Jibrin

Bayt Jibrin

Bayt Jibrin was a Palestinian Arab village located northwest of the city of Hebron. The village had a total land area of 56,185 dunams or , of which were built-up while the rest remained farmland.The early inhabitants of Bayt Jibrin are the Canaanites...

 and Ajjur

Ajjur

Ajjur was a Palestinian Arab village of over 3,700 inhabitants located 24 kilometers northwest of Hebron. It was captured by Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, during which all of its inhabitants fled or were expelled...

 as well as Palestinians from the city of Tubas

Tubas

Tubas or Toubas is a small Palestinian city in the northeastern West Bank, located northeast of Nablus, a few kilometers west of the Jordan River. A city of over 16,000 inhabitants, it serves as the economic and administrative center of the Tubas Governorate. Its urban area consists of 2,271 dunams...

.

Local infrastructure

There are 135 commercial shops, three bakeries and one pharmacy in the camp. There is 35,000 square meters of road in Souf. About 98% of the inhabitants have access to water. The Jordanian government runs a post office, a police station and youth club in Souf. There are six schools in the camp, four managed by the UNRWA and the only two secondary schools by the Jordanian government.

External links

• Souf, articles from UNWRA