Some 400 Syrians on the brink of death must be urgently evacuated from Madaya to receive medical treatment, the United Nations said after the first deliveries of aid in months arrived in the besieged town.
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Time was running out for hundreds of sick and starving civilians needing immediate medical care in the besieged Syrian town of Madaya, a top aid worker said Tuesday.
The first shipment of desperately needed food aid reached a besieged Syrian town Monday as part of a U.N.-backed agreement to bring relief to starving residents who say they have been forced to eat leaves and cats.
The medical charity MSF says 28 people have starved to death since December 1.
Another convoy entered two Shiite villages, al Foua and Kefraya in the northwestern province of Idlib 200 miles away.
It will take several days to distribute the aid in Madaya, near Damascus, and the Shia villages of Foua and Kfarya in northern Syria, and the supplies are probably enough to last for a month, aid agencies said.
Pawel Krzysiek, who is with the ICRC in Madaya, said after arriving: “The people… were coming every five minutes asking, ‘Listen, did you bring food, did you bring medicine?'”
“We had to make do by eating grass”.
Elizabeth Hoff, the WHO representative in Damascus who went with the aid convoy to Madaya on Monday, told Reuters her organization had asked the Syrian government’s permission to take mobile clinics to treat people trapped in the town.
The U.N.-supported aid operation was agreed on last week and appeared to be proceeding Monday. People said they resorted to extreme measures to survive.
Up to 4.5 million people live in hard-to-reach areas, including almost 400,000 people in 15 besieged locations who do not have access to life-saving aid. “To relieve the suffering of these tens of thousands of people, there has to be regular access to these areas”.
French Ambassador Francois Delattre said there could be “no credible political process without progress on the humanitarian front”.
Vehicles from the International Committee of the Red Cross were on their way to Madaya from Damascus, and to al Foua and Kefraya, the International Committee of the Red Cross’s Syria Twitter account said.
Syrian women speak to the press on the outskirts of the besieged rebel-held town of Madaya after bei …
As many as 67 people have perished in the last two months as a result of starvation or scarcity of medical supplies, Dr. Mohammed Yousef, heading a local medical team, said.
If they were not evacuated immediately, “the situation will be more than dramatic tomorrow”, he said.
The UN humanitarian coordinator for Syria, Yacoub El Hillo, warned that “many more will die” unless government forces and rebels lift sieges of towns across the country.
“The information concerning the humanitarian situation in Madaya is based on false information”.
“I think that you are all aware that we are talking about 400,000 people living under besieged areas in Syria”.
The Syria conflict, which will enter its sixth year in early 2016, has left more than 250,000 people dead and turned the country into the world’s largest source of refugees and displaced persons, according to the UN.
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“I solemnly call for the lifting of the sieges and the halt of indiscriminate attacks on civilians”, Fabius said during his New Year’s greeting to journalists.
