Vital aid has arrived at the besieged Syrian town of Madaya.
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US Ambassador Samantha Power said “over 400 people are on the brink of death in need of immediate medical evacuation” from Madaya.
The UN has long denounced the use of starvation by all sides in the Syrian conflict as a weapon of war, which could eventually be pursued as a war crime or a crime against humanity.
The city has been divided between government control in the west and rebel control in the east since shortly after fighting there began in mid-2012.
No aid had reached Madaya since October.
But Mr O’Brien said all the evidence showed there had been very severe malnourishment, severe food shortages, and reports of people “who are either starving or indeed have starved and died”.
“There is no comparison in what we saw in Madaya”, the United Nations refugee agency’s chief in Damascus, Sajjad Malik, told journalists in Geneva, when asked to compare the devastation in the town to other areas in Syria.
According to the monitoring group Siege Watch, however, the total number of people living in besieged areas of Syria is over one million. “We have to humiliate ourselves to go to them and beg for food”.
Shocking images of starving residents of Madaya have garnered global attention.
The situation has been so dire that a doctor told CNN he has nothing to give his patients except sugar or salt water.
One opposition activist has said people were eating leaves and plants.
The U.N has assured that additional convoys will be sent to the same locations over the coming days, carrying UNHCR aid including blankets, winter clothes, jerry cans, household items and diapers, along with their partner agencies the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, that will be providing food and medicine.
SANA said the deliveries were headed toward the adjacent Shiite villages of Foua and Kfarya in Idlib province, under siege by rebels seeking to oust President Bashar Assad, as well as toward Madaya, which is blockaded by government troops and the Lebanese Hezbollah militant group.
“The Syrian government is not and will not exert any policy of starvation against its own people”, Syria’s United Nations ambassador Bashar Ja’afari was quoted as saying by the Associated Press.
With the Syrian conflict already in its fifth year, various humanitarian organizations are hoping for it to end soon.
“The medics in Madaya are not equipped for technical hospitalisation of really critical cases”, the medical group said in an emailed statement.
USA Today reported that a spokesperson from the United Nations also added that a one-time convoy will not solve this problem. The UN said its vehicles were not used to take anyone out of Madaya. “It’s heart-breaking to see so many hungry people”.
The Syrian Ambassador told reporters the pictures of staving people were “fabrications”.
The Syrian civil war has been raging for almost five years and has claimed more than 250,000 lives. Fuaa and Kafraya are more than 300km from Damascus, while Madaya is about 40km from the capital.
For example, in Damascus, flour costs 79 cents a kilogram.
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In Madaya, which has an estimated population of double the size, 44 lorries arrived with 7,800 food parcels including rice and lentils and corresponding levels of other supplies. But in Madaya, the price soars to $300 a liter.
