ISIS has seized the 18,000-strong Palestinian refugee camp Yarmouk in southern Damascus, the capital of Syria, reports say.
The Islamic State militants battled groups inside the camp earlier today.
ISIS has succeeded in taking over “the majority of the camp,” Anwar Abdel Hadi, director of political affairs for the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in Damascus, told AFP.
Militants are in “control over wide parts” of the refugee camp, added the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The Yarmouk camp was built for Palestinians fleeing the Arab-Israeli war in 1948. Now, generations of refugees have grown up there.
The camp was besieged by President Assad’s forces in 2012 and the Al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist group Al-Nusra has besieged the camp for the better part of 2014, reducing the 40,000 residents to survive on weeds, The Telegraph reported.
Resistance forces inside the camp show what life was like in August, 2014
"The extreme hardship faced by Palestine refugees in Yarmouk, but also in other locations in Syria as a result of the armed conflict is, from a human point of view, unacceptable," said the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine in a statement.
“There has been too much suffering. We have to remember that we are dealing with yet another generation of Palestine refugees facing the trauma of dispossession and displacement,” said the U.N. Commissioner-General Krähenbühl.
ISIS militants got their start fighting Assad in the Syrian civil war, which is now entering its fifth year. Over 3.8 million Syrians have fled, while 7.6 million Syrians are internally displaced.
ISIS now controls large swaths of Syria and is fighting against splinter rebel groups as well as Assad's forces.
In this video, uploaded to Youtube earlier this month, UN Commissioner-General visits the Yarmouk camp.