In 15 of the areas assessed, if land access is not granted, helicopter operations are the only viable option.
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Staunch regime ally Russian Federation on Wednesday said that the local truce in Daraya would be observed until 00:01 am on Friday (2101 GMT Thursday) to allow aid deliveries.
The Syrian government is cooperating with the United Nations to make humanitarian aid available to all Syrian citizens amid global concerns of food and medicine availability, Syrian presidential advisor Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban said on Thursday.
While the United Nations continues to provide aid to millions of Syrians every month, O’Brien said it needs access and “the consent of the Syrian government and all necessary security guarantees, in order to conduct air drops”.
The UN’s humanitarian aid task force has a list of 19 locations in Syria it hopes to reach and says almost 600 thousand people are now stranded in besieged areas of the civil war-torn country.
France’s U.N. ambassador says Syria’s authorization of some aid convoys to besieged Syrian towns is “at best a drop in the ocean” and the United Nations must urgently prepare to make airdrops to areas most in need of humanitarian help. But air drops are a “last resort” as they are costly, complicated and deliver a mere trickle of aid. Britain’s U.N. Ambassador Matthew Rycroft said, “there has been some modest progress but … that is too little too late”.
De Mistura pointed out last week that it can take six weeks of air drops to deliver the same amount of aid to an area as a single convoy over land.
An estimated 8,000 people live in Daraya, one of the first towns in Syria to erupt in anti-government demonstrations in 2012 and one of the first under a strict regime siege the same year.
“I told the council that the operating space for humanitarian actors is shrinking as violence and attacks across Syria increase”, O’Brien said in an statement.
“What is at stake here is the necessity to put an end to a humanitarian disaster”, French Ambassador Francois Delattre told reporters ahead of the meeting.
The UN believes there are more than 4.6m people living in hard-to-reach areas in Syria, including almost 600,000 in besieged areas.
Global medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said Turkey should open its borders to some 100,000 people fleeing fighting between rebel groups and Islamic State in northern Syria, while Europe should begin granting asylum to those escaping the frontlines.
The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) alliance had seized 20 villages outside the town, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Those included 10 people who were on a bus travelling on a road used by rebels as a supply route, rescue workers said. “Not only because we reached Darayya for the first time since 2012, since it was besieged, with the first limited humanitarian installment, but also because we actually plan to go to 11 besieged areas in the next few days”.
Syria rejected United Nations requests to send aid to Zabadani, a mountain resort which has been besieged by government forces and Lebanon’s Hezbollah fighters since past year, and Waer, the last rebel-held neighborhood in the central city of Homs, Pitt said.
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And in the regime’s coastal stronghold of Latakia, a suicide bombing near a mosque killed at least two people and wounded four others.
