any other group in Jordan, we can be quite certain that two-year temporary passport holders are ex-Gazans without citizenship. Holding such a passport is not, however, compulsory for ex-Gazans, so there remains a risk that some would be excluded from the analysis;
an examination of the data, however, suggests that such a group would represent at most
only a small fraction of all ex-Gazans, and thus will not have any significant impact on
the analysis.
Of the 28,807 Palestinian refugees residing inside camps who do not hold Jordanian or
any other citizenship, 94% hold two-year passports and 2% hold the five-year temporary
Jordanian passport generally issued to Palestinians from the West Bank. This leaves 4%,
which would include Gazans who have arrived after 1967 for the purpose of marriage,
family reunification or other reasons (and are not considered to be ‘ex-Gazans’) as well as
any ex-Gazans who have failed to exchange their original Egyptian travel documents for
Jordanian temporary passports, or have otherwise chosen not to or been unable to secure
or renew the two-year temporary passport. Therefore, the vast majority of non-citizen exGazans residing inside camps are captured by employing the two-year passport as a proxy
variable.
When presenting data at the household level, we define an ex-Gaza household as any
household in which the household head is an ex-Gaza Palestinian refugee.
Differentiating between ex-Gaza populations
There are 27,049 non-citizen ex-Gazan individuals in the dataset who report holding a
two-year temporary passport, which amounts to nearly 14% of the total 197,642 surveyed
Palestinian refugees residing inside camps. Of these, less than half live in Jerash camp.
This presents a unique opportunity to attempt to isolate the ‘local’ factors specific to Jerash camp from the bigger picture of ex-Gazan statelessness. Furthermore, the proximity
of Jerash to Souf camp, where less than 2% of the residents are ex-Gazan, provides another sounding board against which to test ‘locational’ explanations for poverty in Jerash.
To fine-tune our enquiry, we ran preliminary comparative statistical analysis for the
following categories: i) ex-Gazans in Jerash camp; ii) non-ex-Gaza Palestinian refugees
in Jerash camp; iii) ex-Gazans in Hitteen camp (which has the second-largest ex-Gaza
population of all the camps); iv) non-ex-Gaza Palestinian refugees in Hitteen camp; v)
ex-Gazans in the combined remaining 12 camps; vi) non-ex-Gaza Palestinian refugees in
each of the remaining 12 camps.
Ex-Gaza two-year passport holders make up 91% of the Palestinian refugee population
in Jerash camp (13,114 individuals residing in 2,394 households). Six per cent of camp
residents hold Jordanian citizenship, around three quarters of whom are women married
to ex-Gaza men. The remaining 3% of the Jerash camp population is a mixture of other
non-citizens, including Palestinians from the West Bank holding five-year temporary
passports and those holding ‘other residency permits’, suggesting family reunification
cases from Gaza, or ‘no residency permit,’ which could include ex-Gazans who, for whatever reason, do not hold a two-year temporary passport 10. Given the low number of nonex-Gazans, the similar scoring across most indicators11 and the absence of impact on the
overall camp profile, individual data is only reported for ex-Gazans in Jerash camp. When
The comprehensive survey found that there were altogether 89 individuals residing in Jerash
camp with foreign citizenship: 77 Egyptians, 7 Syrians, 4 Lebanese, and 1 person from another
Arab country.
11
Where scoring is significantly different (health insurance, labour force participation) this can be
attributed to the profile of the Jordanian citizen wives (e.g. low labour force participation because
the majority are women) or has no impact on the overall socio-economic status of households.
10
‘Just getting by’
Ex-Gazans in Jerash and other refugee camps in Jordan
17
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