Mobile clinics, medical teams needed in Madaya

Earlier on Monday, a humanitarian convoy reached the town with health and food supplies for the 42,000 desperate residents after reports of people starving to death under encirclement by Syrian regime forces.

Graphic images of death and starvation coming out of Madaya have not been independently confirmed by aid groups or CNN.

Spokesman Pawel Krzysiek said on Twitter that ICRC, United Nations and Syrian Red Crescent teams were leaving the area, but that there was “more aid to follow in the next days”.

Aid convoys headed for a besieged Syrian town where thousands are trapped and the United Nations says people are reported to have died of starvation.

Food and medical supplies reached Madaya in trucks. “It is a systematic and dirty war tactic that they have been using for over two years now in Syria”.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) have said that at least 28 people, including six babies under one year of age, have died from hunger-related causes in Madaya.

According to SANA, Syria’s state news agency, 65 trucks loaded with aid supplies entered Madaya and the other besieged towns, Foua and Kefraya.

Meanwhile, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius on Monday called on the Syrian regime to end the siege of rebel-held Madaya and said a halt to airstrikes by the regime and its Russian ally was an “absolute necessity”.

Madaya has been ravaged by starvation in the Syrian civil war.

The International Committee of the Red Cross hailed the first deliveries, with its head of the Syria delegation, Marianne Gasser, describing the operation as “a very positive development”.

In Madaya, Al-Manar, a Hezbollah-owned TV channel, showed men, women, and children waiting for the convoys at the town’s primary entrance.

The situation in the town of Madaya is not a single case and some 4.5 million people live in besieged and hard-to-reach areas in Syria and need humanitarian assistance, the official said.

He said: “People are surviving by consuming water with sugar, salt or spices if they can find any”.

The delivery will happen simultaneously with aid entering two government-held towns under rebel siege in the northwest of the country.

“They need medical evacuation on an urgent basis tonight and they want permission from the government of Syria to lift those people out” said New Zealand’s Ambassador Gerard van Bohemen. People are similarly stuck in Foua and Kefraya, which rebel groups have blockaded since March.

Aid agencies have warned of widespread starvation in Madaya, where 40,000 people are at risk.

Ashley Proud, Mercy Corps’ director for south and central Syria, said that the level of malnourishment in besieged areas “will not be solved by a single aid delivery”.

Speaking at the United Nations headquarters, he blamed “armed terrorist groups” for stealing humanitarian aid and reselling it at prohibitive prices.