DW, Feb. 24, 2016 – Aid agencies say at least 500,000 Syrians living under siege have not had enough food in weeks – and some of them are starving.
Arab Red Crescent teams on the ground confirmed the pallets landed on target.
Stephen O’Brien, head the UN’s World Food Program (WFP), reported the news to the UN Security Council on Wednesday.
“Earlier this morning, a WFP plane dropped the first cargo of 21 tons of items into Deir el-Zour,” O’Brien told the Council.
He acknowledged that air drops are the least efficient form of aid delivery but also cited “benefits to this approach as a last resort.”
Deir el-Zour, which lies along the banks of the Euphrates River in eastern Syria and had a pre-war population of about 240,000, has been besieged by “Islamic State” (IS) fighters for weeks, making safe aid deliveries by ground impossible.
The UN has called on all sides to lift starvation sieges of all Syrian cities. The UN estimated that nearly 500,000 people live under siege conditions, although some NGOs have said the figure is much higher.