The United Nations Security Council is set to hold a special meeting Friday to assess whether aid workers have access to besieged areas in Syria as demanded last month by major world powers.
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The ceasefire went into effect at 00:01 Wednesday (22:01 GMT Tuesday) and had been agreed to with the governments of Syria and the United States, Kuralenko said.
Bissan Fakih, a spokeswoman for advocacy group The Syria Campaign, said people in Daraya would only breathe a sigh of relief when they received food.
But even the State Department now sees little point in escalating the conflict with US involvement that would likely lead to even more bloodshed in a war that has killed more than a quarter of a million people, displaced half the Syrian population and evolved into a tangled battlefield of competing groups and agendas.
Last month members of the International Syria Support Group, which includes Russian Federation and the United States, agreed that the U.N. World Food Program should air drop aid to Syria’s besieged communities if land access was denied to any of them. “High-altitude airdrops to those locations are not possible owing to the risk of harming people on the ground along the path between release of the cargo from the airplane and the actual landing zone”, it said in a statement.
But UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said helicopters would have to be used to carry aid to 15 of 19 besieged areas with urban or semi-urban densely-populated towns.
“In urban besieged areas, it will probably have to be delivered by helicopters”, requiring clearance from the government because the United Nations would rely on private flight companies, he said.
The appeal comes ahead of a Security Council meeting on Friday called to discuss access for humanitarian aid to the besieged areas.
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 a year ago, and Waer, the last rebel-held neighbourhood in the central city of Homs, Ms Pitt said.
A convoy entered the town of Daraya for the first time since 2012 on Wednesday and a second delivery reached Moadamiyeh for the first time since March.
But Syria’s opposition said only medical supplies were in the Daraya delivery and British charity Save the Children said it was “shocking and completely unacceptable” that it excluded desperately needed food.
“Daraya needs everything” including food, medicine and fuel, said an activist inside the town.
According to the United Nations, a total of 592,000 people are living under siege in Syria, the majority surrounded by regime forces, while another four million live in hard-to-reach areas.
Asked whether his government or others were prepared to use their own air forces to deliver assistance if access is denied, Rycroft said they would wait to see Assad’s response to the Sunday demand and take the matter “one step at a time”.
Ambassador Francois Delattre of France, which now chairs the UN Security Council, called for airdrops to all areas in need and blamed the regime for blocking access to besieged villages and towns.
“On the day of that deadline, the Assad regime has cynically allowed limited amounts of aid into Daraya and Moadamiyeh but it has failed to deliver the widespread humanitarian access called for by the worldwide community”.
“I think we need to continue to pursue with land deliveries”, he said.
The Syrian Democratic Forces alliance had seized 20 villages outside the town, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
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Daraya, an opposition-controlled city that once had a population of more than 250,000, was one of the first areas to protest Assad’s rule.
