United Nations official says starvation exists in besieged Syrian towns

In a press release issued on Monday.

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

Red Cross spokesman Pawel Krzysiek, who accompanied the aid convoy into Madaya, said the effects of the siege on residents were obvious.

The trucks are part of a 49-vehicle convoy.

The operation marked a small, positive development in a bitter conflict now in its fifth year that has killed a quarter of a million people, displaced millions of others and left the country in ruins.

The town, about 15 miles north-west of Damascus, has been blockaded for months by government troops and Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah.

Imad Salamey, a professor of political science at the Lebanese American University, said the objective of such blockades by pro-government forces is generally to drive out fighters and their sympathizers – who are generally members of Syria’s majority population of Sunni Muslims – from areas that are deemed strategic for Assad.

And so we managed to a fairly complicated agreement, so that if they allow us to take food into Madaya we’ll also take food into other towns in the north of Syria, near Idlib.

“Whatever we had in the cars, we gave to them”, Malik said.

“Armed terrorists have prevented the delivery of these aid to Foua and Kefraya”, he added.

One eight-year-old boy in Madaya told dpa he and his family had been living on “water, salt and pepper” for the last week, but he was fasting completely on Monday to await the arrival of aid. The town has attracted particular attention in recent days because of reports of deaths and images of severely malnourished residents that have circulated across social media.

The aid operation was agreed on last week.

Amid the total collapse of health services in the town, WHO said it wants to deploy mobile health clinics to Madaya.

According to the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders, at least 28 people died of starvation in the town of Madaya, besieged by government and allied forces for the last six months.

Mr Krzysiek said he saw a lot of people on the street, “some of them smiling to us and waving to us, but many just simply too weak”. “Of course they will confiscate this humanitarian assistance and use it as a matter of gaining at the detriment of the civilian population”.

Ghosn, who spoke to journalists accompanied by government officials, also blamed rebels in Madaya, saying: “Their depots are full while we go hungry”. “We have no food – even bread”.

A convoy of 44 trucks from the UN, Syrian Red Crescent and International Red Cross (ICRC) delivered emergency food supplies to Madaya on Monday, in the first aid to reach the area since October.

“We continue to call on all parties to the conflict to facilitate sustained and unimpeded access to all people in besieged and hard-to-reach areas in Syria”, Mr Hillo emphasised. The UN World Food Programme said the supplies could feed more than 40,000 people for one month, and the ICRC said it was taking enough medicine for three months.

He said his government was committed to “cooperate fully” on aid delivery but said much of what was said about Madaya was “based on false information”.

Peter Wilson, Britain’s deputy United Nations ambassador, said in NY it was “good news that those convoys are getting through, although it’s little and it’s late”.