The U.N. children’s agency said Friday that it witnessed the death of a teenager who died of starvation “in front of our eyes,” as well as several cases of severe malnutrition among children trapped in a besieged Syrian town near Damascus, the Chicago Tribune reported Jan. 16th.
Hanaa Singer, UNICEF’s representative in Syria, said in a statement that the 16-year-old, identified as Ali, died of malnutrition on Thursday in a clinic in the town of Madaya.
Trucks from the U.N. and other humanitarian organizations entered Madaya on Thursday for the second time in a week after reports of starvation deaths. The town has been under siege for months by government forces.
Two other communities, the villages of Foua and Kfarya in northern Syria, besieged by Syrian rebels were also included in the aid operation.
The death of the teenager as international aid workers were inside Madaya reinforced the scale of the humanitarian catastrophe in the town and other besieged areas.
Another aid worker who entered Madaya, Abeer Pamuk of SOS Children’s Villages in Syria, said the situation is so devastating that desperate parents resort to giving children sleeping pills in order to calm their hunger.
“Their parents had nothing to feed them. So they just chose to let them sleep and forget about their hunger,” she said in a statement from the group.

Starvation stalks a Syrian town: It is a modern-day nightmare

“None of the children I saw looked healthy. They all looked pale and skinny. They could barely talk or walk. Their teeth are black, their gums are bleeding, and they have lots of health problems with their skin, hair, nails, teeth,” Pamuk added.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the United Nations and its humanitarian partners are able to deliver food to only 1 percent of the 400,000 people under siege in Syria, down from 5 percent just over a year ago.

Siege, starvation left Syrian town in grim state, U.N. says

Juliette Touma, an Amman-based UNICEF representative, said the agency’s staff who spent close to seven hours in Madaya on Thursday are “terribly shocked.”
Her staff saw “pretty horrific scenes” of malnourishment, including among women, children and the elderly, she told The Associated Press.
She added, however, that many felt relief at finally arriving at these hard-to-reach areas. “It is important right now to maintain this humanitarian access … There are 14 other Madayas” in Syria, she said.
Singer, in the statement, said that at the makeshift hospital UNICEF visited in the town, there were only two doctors and two health professionals working under overwhelming conditions.

Associated Press contributed to this report