Trucks from an aid convoy carrying food, medicine and hygiene kits have begun to enter the besieged, starving Syrian town of Madaya in an agreement that has also seen a convoy enter two Shia villages 200 miles away in the country’s north.The Syrian government has allowed the aid through to Madaya after images of emaciated children and adults from the town prompted worldwide condemnation and outrage.
Five more people died of starvation there on Sunday, the international charity Médecins Sans Frontières has confirmed. The organisation had said that 200 more malnourished patients could become critical if aid did not arrive.
Residents said they had been forced to live on tree leaves, flavoured water, and grass scoured from minefields, and children had been kept from succumbing to malnourishment by being fed sugar serums. However, several have died of hunger.
The UN security council discussed the situation in Madaya at a meeting in New York on Monday called by New Zealand, Spain and France.
“The tactic of siege and starvation is one of the most appalling characteristics of the Syrian conflict,” New Zealand’s UN ambassador, Gerard van Bohemen, told reporters.
US ambassador Samantha Power also had strong words about Madaya, slamming the “grotesque starve-or-surrender tactics the Syrian regime is using right now against its own people.”
“Look at the haunting pictures of civilians, including children, even babies, in Madaya,” she told the UN general assembly.
“These are just the pictures we see. There are hundreds of thousands of people being deliberately besieged, deliberately starved, right now. And these images, they remind us of the second world war.”
Forces loyal to the Syrian regime have enforced a tight siege on Madaya since July, and only one aid delivery has previously been allowed, in October. The plight of civilians there is tied to the fate of two Shia villages in northern Syria, Fua and Kefraya, that are surrounded by rebels. Backers of the rebels and the government have attempted to orchestrate a population swap that has yet to materialise.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said it would deliver food, medicine and other aid to the three besieged towns after permission for a coordinated mission was granted by the Syrian government, but called for unhindered access to all besieged areas in Syria.
The World Food Programme earlier said it had loaded aid trucks as part of an inter-agency convoy delivering aid to Madaya from rural Damascus. The convoy in Fua and Kefraya brought supplies from the city of Homs.
Separately on Monday, a UK-based monitor said at least 12 children had died after a Russian airstrike hit a school in Aleppo province. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the strike in the town of Anjara also injured at least 20 people, all of them children and teachers.
It also reported that three children had been killed by rebel rocket fire on a government-held district in Aleppo city. Control of the city has been divided between government forces in the west and rebel fighters in the east since shortly after fighting began there in mid-2012.
Government forces regularly carry out air raids on the east, while rebels fire rockets into the west.
Meanwhile, the UK said it conducted four airstrikes on Islamic State targets on Sunday. The bombings saw brimstone missiles being used in Syria for the first time.
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