Relief officials at the UN have expressed growing alarm about the deepening humanitarian disaster in Syria’s Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp, which was invaded last week by Islamic State militants and their allies.
Roughly 18,000 people, including 3,500 children, have been trapped by fighting in Yarmouk, which is on the southern outskirts of the capital, Damascus, and is less than 10 miles from the presidential palace.
Pierre Krähenbühl, commissioner general of the UN Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa) , which administers aid to Palestinian refugees in the Middle East, said the residents are slowly starving.
He gave an emergency briefing on the crisis on Monday to UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon and the Security Council via video link from Amman, Jordan.
Speaking to reporters afterwards, Mr Krähenbühl said the situation was “more desperate than ever for civilians inside Yarmouk”.
He has limited options to alleviate their suffering.
He said he has not spoken directly to representatives of the Islamic State, nor was it entirely clear who wields influence over their leaders.
He called on the Security Council and all UN members with influence over the combatants to exert pressure on them to halt the fighting and allow the agency to deliver food, water and medicine to Yarmouk, which has been shut off from all outside aid for the past week and has been intermittently isolated for the past two years.
Residents have been subsisting on roughly 400 calories a day, he said, and need at least 2,000. He said their basic daily preoccupation now is “bare survival”.
Christopher Gunness, a spokesman for the agency, said earlier that Yarmouk residents were terrified of venturing out of doors.
“The situation in Yarmouk has descended into lower levels of inhumanity,” Mr Gunness said. “There’s conflict raging in the streets outside.
“Things are as dire as they have been since the war began.”
On Sunday, the agency issued a statement imploring combatants in Yarmouk to halt the fighting.
“We demand that all parties exercise maximum restraint and abide by their obligations under international law to protect civilians,” the statement said.
New York Times