A sick girl died in the town of Douma in eastern of eastern Damascus on Tuesday after the Assad regime refused to allow her to leave the besieged area for treatment, local newspaper Inab Baladi said. The child’s death came just a few hours after the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had warned that the humanitarian situation in eastern Ghouta had reached “a critical point.”
Fayez Orabi, spokesman for the Directorate of Health in Rural Damascus, told the newspaper that increasing number of children are dying from chronic diseases that continue to worsen because of the siege imposed by the Assad forces on the area.
Orabi said that children are the most vulnerable to injury and death due to lack of medicines and shortage of doctors as well as the Assad regime’s deliberate bombing of hospitals on a daily basis.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on Monday warned of a humanitarian crisis in the rebel-held area.
“The humanitarian situation in eastern Ghouta has reached a critical point. As so often in Syria over the last six years, ordinary people are once again trapped in a situation where life slowly becomes impossible and where goods and aid are severely limited,” the ICRC’s Middle East director, Robert Mardini, said in a statement.
The Assad regime continues to block the evacuation of around 500 sick and wounded people from the Damascus suburb which has been under siege by regime forces since 2013.
During the latest round of peace talks in Geneva, the Syrian opposition’s Negotiations Committee accused the Assad regime of renouncing the negotiating process as its forces continue to pursue a military solution through and intensify their attacks on eastern Ghouta and other areas across Syria.
A UN report last week indicated that 16 people had so far died from chronic diseases in eastern Ghouta.
Since early November, eastern Ghouta has been subjected to intensified aerial bombardment by the Assad regime forces, which left hundreds of casualties among civilians and caused widespread destruction to residential buildings in the area. (Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Department)
