Thousands of lives are threatened in the rebel-held Syrian town of Madaya, where a siege by the Syrian military has blocked food aid since October, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) said yesterday.
Trucks with supplies to feed the town’s 40,000 inhabitants for one month were on standby, Bettina Luescher, a spokeswoman for the UN agency, said.
The town, about 25km north-west of Damascus, has been under siege since July by President Bashar al-Assad’s soldiers and fighters from the Lebanese Hezbollah movement.
Local activists say an estimated 40,000 people have little access to food and medicines.
“Food is rare. We cannot provide milk for infants,” Khaled Mohamed, a doctor at a field hospital, said yesterday. “Today, a 10-year-old child died of malnutrition. People are eating grass to stay alive.”
The doctor said that “most of the people in Madaya suffer from severe malnutrition to the extent that they started about 10 days ago to slaughter dogs and cats and eat their flesh.”
The last humanitarian supplies, including food rations, had reached Madaya in mid-October after a local agreement by the opposition and government, according to the World Food Programme.
“WFP is deeply concerned about the reported humanitarian situation in the town of Madaya, which has been besieged for many months with thousands of lives under threat,” Luescher said.
The Red Cross reported that people also suffered from the cold as there was no electricity or burning fuel.
The opposition Syrian National Coalition warned of a “humanitarian catastrophe” in Madaya.
“There must be an immediate move to save lives of the civilians and end siege on Madaya and other areas in Syria,” the alliance said in a statement.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Monday that at least 23 people, including children, had died in Madaya because of the siege and mines laid by al-Assad’s forces around the town.
At least 300 children in Madaya are also suffering from malnutrition, the Britain-based monitoring group reported.
More than 250,000 people are estimated to have been killed in Syria’s conflict since it started in 2011.
Nine people were killed and more than 30 wounded in shelling yesterday on government-held central Damascus, the Observatory and state media reported.
Rocket shells hit Abid Street, which runs between the parliament building and the central bank, as well as other areas of the city centre, the watchdog said.
Central Damascus is regularly hit by mortar and rocket shells fired from rebel-held areas on the outskirts of the capital, which have themselves been devastated by three years of artillery shelling and airstrikes.