UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned that any forces using starvation as a tactic of war in Syria would be guilty of war crimes.
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“Perhaps nothing more urgently reflects the need to act than the harrowing scenes from Madaya”, Mr. Ban told reporters at a press conference in NY following remarks to the UN General Assembly highlighting his 2016 priorities.
The second wave of aid convoys entered the besieged Syrian cities of Madaya, al-Fouaa and Kefraya on Thursday evening, delivering desperately needed food and humanitarian supplies to residents, the International Committee of the Red Cross said.
The talks planned for January 25 in Geneva are part of a peace process endorsed by the U.N. Security Council last month in a rare display of global agreement on Syria, where the war has killed 250,000 people.
A similar aid convoy of 17 trucks is on its way to the villages of Foua and Kfarya, in the northern province of Idlib, which has been besieged by the Syrian rebels.
Dozens of aid trucks reached Madaya earlier thsi week where more than two dozen people are reported to have starved to death, after an outpouring of global concern and condemnation over the dire conditions in the town, where some 42,000 people are living under a government siege.
Residents who said they have received permission from the Syrian government to leave the besieged town wait with their belongings after an aid convoy entered Madaya, Syria. All the three villages that are in the news – Fu’a, Kafrya (under siege by the rebels) and Madaya (under siege by government forces) – are under siege, as are many others, and suffering the consequences of such long sieges.
French Ambassador Francois Delattre told AFP that the meeting to be held Friday from 2000 GMT “will draw the world’s attention to the humanitarian tragedy that is unfolding in Madaya and in other towns in Syria”.
Employees in the Damascus office of the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) published the report with the government’s changes, without clearance from OCHA’s offices in Turkey and Jordan, according an email obtained by Middle East Eye.
Kerry would call on Russian Federation to pressure its Syrian allies into allowing “humanitarian aid to the Syrian people, particularly in besieged and hard-to-reach places”, a spokesman said.
Ban said the United Nations and its humanitarian partners are able to deliver food to only 1 per cent of the 400,000 people under siege in Syria, down from an already dismal 5 per cent just over a year ago.
We lobbied hard for UN Security Council Resolutions 2165 and 2191 – superseded by Resolution 2258 – which now enable the UN to deliver aid across borders, without the consent of the regime. “I would say that they are being held hostage – but it is even worse”. Singer pointed out that “there are 14 other ‘Madayas'”.
The head of the United Nations (UN) has said the warring parties in Syria were committing war crimes by withholding food from civilians.
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He said all sides – including the Syrian Government – are committing this and other “atrocious acts” prohibited under global humanitarian law. There are also about 200,000 people besieged by the so-called Islamic State (IS or ISIS or ISIL or Daesh), and 12,000 in areas controlled by opposition groups.
