Following the 1948 Nabka, Palestinian refugees from the northern parts of Palestine, namely Safad, Haifa and Jaffa, fled to the Syria Arab Republic. Palestinian refugees who fled because of the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights in 1978 also moved to Syria. As of now, according to UNRWA, there are more than 48,000 officially registered Palestinian refugees who live in refugee camps, both official and nonofficial, across Syria.

However, because of the bloody civil war in Syria and the violence which has engulfed the country, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have fled Syria to neighboring countries, mainly Lebanon and Jordan. Of these refugees, a huge number are Palestinian refugees who number in the thousands (though there are no official data).

While Jordanian authorities have prevented Palestinian refugees fleeing the conflict in Syria from entering the Hashemite Kingdom, and while Lebanon, for several reasons, remains the most uninviting place for Palestinian refugees, some of these Palestinian refugee families have found themselves enduring different hardships as they made their way to nowhere but to the Gaza Strip.

In July 2012, Gaza received the first Palestinian refugee family from Syria. Currently, the number of officially registered Palestinian refugee families from Syria is only 26 families of 157 persons.