Hundreds need urgent evacuation in besieged Syrian town

NEW YORK

About 400 people in the besieged Syrian town of Madaya must be urgently evacuated to receive life-saving medical assistance, UN diplomats said Monday.

Spain's UN Ambassador Roman Oyarzun Marchesi told reporters in New York that the Security Council received a briefing from Stephen O'Brien, UN humanitarian affairs chief, who said some 400 people in Madaya were in "very critical situation".

"If they are not evacuated tonight, the situation will be more than dramatic," Marchesi said, according to a transcript carried by New Zealand's UN mission.

The closed-door meeting was requested by council members France, New Zealand and Spain.

Earlier on Monday, a humanitarian convoy reached the town with health and food supplies for the 42,000 desperate residents after reports of people starving to death under encirclement by Syrian regime forces.

New Zealand's UN envoy Gerard van Bohemen said: "We were just told they need medical evacuation on an urgent basis, tonight and so they want permission from the government of Syria to let those people out."

Last month, 23 people died of starvation in the town, which has been blockaded by the Assad regime and Hezbollah militants for close to 200 days.

Living conditions in the town have deteriorated as winter sets in. Electricity supplies have been cut and residents have resorted to burning the remains of their homes to provide heating.

"The humanitarian crisis in Madaya is but one more sign of the Assad regime’s brutality throughout Syria," the U.S. ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, said in a statement.

"Blocking aid in order to starve civilians is grotesque -- and but one more reason why Assad’s supporters should recognize that he has lost the legitimacy to govern the Syrian people," she added.

The Syria conflict, which will enter its sixth year in early 2016, has left more than 250,000 people dead and turned the country into the world's largest source of refugees and displaced persons, according to the UN.

Nearly 8 million victims are internally displaced and more than 4 million have fled to nearby countries since the conflict started.