A Syrian national flag flutters near residents who said they have received permission from the Syrian government to leave the besieged town as they wait with their belongings after an aid convoy entered Madaya, Syria, January 14, 2016.
Advertisement
BEIRUT/GENEVA, Jan 15 (Reuters) – The U.N. children’s fund UNICEF on Friday confirmed cases of severe malnutrition among children in the besieged Syrian town of Madaya, where local relief workers reported 32 deaths of starvation in the past month.
The UN report comes as on Thursday, UN chief Ban Ki-moon said that the use of food as a weapon against the Syrian people is a war crime amid reports of severe malnourishment in some besieged towns.
Juliette Touma, an Amman-based UNICEF representative, said the agency’s staff who spent close to seven hours in Madaya on Thursday are “terribly shocked”.
“There can be no reason…no explanation or excuse for preventing aid from reaching people”, United Nations aid official Kang Kyung Wha told an emergency Security Council meeting on ending the blockades. “But we are advocating strongly and asking all sides to lift the siege on all the communities in Syria and provide unimpeded, unconditional humanitarian access”.
A mobile clinic with medics was dispatched to Madaya to treat people suffering from malnutrition, the World Health Organization said, a day after a second aid convoy reached the town.
More than 260,000 people have died in Syria’s conflict, which began in March 2011 with anti-government protests but has evolved into a multi-sided civil war. The death of the teenager as global aid workers were inside Madaya reinforced the scale of the humanitarian catastrophe in the town and other besieged areas.
“In this context, the implementation of humanitarian operations will be a new line of work for the Russian armed forces in Syria”, he said in televised comments.
“The barbarity of this tactic can not be overstated”, Kang said.
The city is contested, with IS controlling most of the territory but the Syrian government holding some neighborhoods.
He said Syria’s Il-76 military transport planes had airdropped 22 metric tons of humanitarian aid to Deir Ezzor using Russian equipment.
The Syrian government airlifted “a limited amount of basic commodities” last Monday, including food to be sold at Damascus prices, the United Nations said.
In the United States, President Barack Obama met with his National Security Council to discuss “intensification” of Washington’s campaign against the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) group in Syria and Iraq.
Advertisement
Only two doctors are said to be working at a make-shift hospital in the besieged city, according to UNICEF representatives. Pro-opposition activists circulated harrowing images on social media of emaciated civilians said to be subsisting on water, grass and anything else they can scavenge in the town.
