Madaya Residents Need Medical Treatment – UN official

New Zealand and Spanish ambassadors have called for the urgent evacuation of 400 people in dire need of medical evacuation.

Hoff told Reuters a Syrian doctor had said that “mothers had absolutely no milk for breastfeeding, the milk had dried up and the babies are not satisfied”. The fighting has forced more than 4 million people to flee the country and has displaced another 6.6 million within Syria. There are hundreds of thousands of people being deliberately besieged, deliberately starved, right now. They were skinny, tired, severely distressed. There was no smile on anybody’s faces.

The aid convoys that arrived Monday, arranged by numerous worldwide organisations, were allowed in as the result of an agreement between the government and rebels.

Malik said people were so hungry that they “repeatedly mentioned that a kilo of rice would cost $300 (275 euros)”.

Later in the day aid convoys reached two villages in Idlib province, al-Fouaa and Kefraya, where 20,000 people have been besieged by Jaish al-Fatah, a collective of opposition groups that includes Ahrar al-Sham and al-Nusra Front, since March 2015.

British Ambassador Matthew Rycroft said “starving civilians is an inhuman tactic used by the (President Bashar) al-Assad regime and their allies”.

Spain’s UN Ambassador Roman Oyarzun Marchesi stressed that “besieging with the goal of starvation is a war crime”.

Blockades have been a feature of Syria’s civil war.

“It has a special product already… which we renewed previous year to deal precisely with this situation and has strengthened language on access to procedures in hard-to-get areas, so we have all the legal requirements needed”, he said.

“The problem is the terrorists are stealing the humanitarian assistance from the Syrian Red Crescent as well as from the United Nations”. There are presently about 15 siege locations in Syria, where 450,000 people are trapped, the United Nations says.

In Damascus, Iran’s interior minister, Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli, reasserted his country’s support for Syria at a joint press conference with his Syrian counterpart, Mohammad al-Shaar.

Abou Ammar, a media activist in the town, said local aid organisations had been waiting since early morning for supplies to arrive.

ICRC spokeswoman Dibeh Fakhr also said its next distribution is planned for Thursday.

A Syrian girl waits with her family as they depart after an aid convoy entered Madaya.

Brice de la Vigne, from the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), said it was a “horrific” situation in Madaya, adding that nearly 250 people in the town were suffering from “acute malnutrition”. It’s not only about Madaya, in Madaya we have 42,000 people. “We welcome the news that aid has finally been able to get in today, but we are told these aid packages only last for up to a month”.

But O’Brien, the United Nations official, refuted that claim.

“I sent an immediate request to authorities for more supplies to be brought in”.

“The intra-Syrian negotiations will not resume unless there is an improvement of the civilians’ plight”, he said.

Added Sajjad Malik, a representative of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees who took part in the operation: “It’s cold and raining, but there is excitement because we are here with some food and blankets”. “The room is often so crowded that they had to give a drip to a patient outdoors because there was no room in the clinic”. “I can hardly stand on my feet”.