All events · After the Wall

Departure and Expulsion of Palestinians from Kuwait

1990–1992 · Middle East & North Africa

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What happened

Kuwait's Palestinian community, more than 350,000 strong before August 1990 and central to the country's professional and administrative workforce, was largely dispersed by the Gulf crisis. Around 180,000 left during the Iraqi occupation, abandoning homes and property accumulated over decades. After liberation in February 1991 the Kuwaiti government, citing the PLO leadership's alignment with Iraq and alleged collaboration, refused with very few exceptions to allow those who had left to return, dismissed Palestinians from public employment, declined to renew residence permits, and subjected many to security detention and, in the immediate post-liberation weeks, to torture and extrajudicial killing. Human Rights Watch documented that about 2,000 Palestinians were taken by the authorities to the Iraqi border and deported, that stateless Palestinians holding Egyptian travel documents were given two weeks' notice to leave, and that families of detainees were pressured to depart. The Crown Prince publicly denied that Kuwait had expelled or would expel Palestinians. By November 1991 around 80,000 remained, including some 23,000 Gazans whose Egyptian travel documents entitled them to settle nowhere. Most of those who left went to Jordan.

Parties

Palestinians left Kuwait during the Iraqi occupation, and after liberation the Kuwaiti authorities dismissed, detained and deported those who remained and refused re-entry to those who had gone

Disputed

The denominator

Kuwait's pre-invasion Palestinian population is generally put at 350,000-400,000, the largest expatriate community in the emirate, out of a total population of about 2.1 million of whom roughly 60 per cent were non-citizens. Fewer than 30,000 remained by 1992.

Where the baseline comes from

• Expulsion of Palestinians from Kuwait (1990–91) — Wikipediaopen-edited
• Demographics of Kuwait — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

There was no mass killing on a scale comparable to the displacement. Human Rights Watch and other organizations documented extrajudicial killings, deaths in custody under torture and disappearances of Palestinians and other residents in the weeks after liberation, numbering in the dozens to low hundreds; no comprehensive count was produced and Kuwaiti courts tried only a small number of cases.

Documented forms of violence

Documented by Middle East Watch / Human Rights Watch in its 1991 reporting and 1992 World Report chapter on Kuwait.

Movements mapped

• Kuwait → Jordan
• Kuwait → Iraq (deportations across the northern border)2,000

Countries touched, on present-day borders

Kuwait, Jordan, Iraq

Related entries

• Overlaps with: Iraqi Invasion and Annexation of Kuwait
  Palestinians who left during the occupation are among the invasion entry's foreign-worker departures, and they are also in the Palestinian entry's net reduction of ~270,000. The exact overlap is unknown.

Sources

• Human Rights Watch news release on the expulsion of Palestinians from Kuwait, 23 October 1991NGO
• Kuwait: Human Rights Developments Since Liberation — Middle East Watch / Human Rights Watch World Report 1992NGO