GENEVA: A top UN aid official, frustrated by obstacles to humanitarian aid in Syria, asked yesterday if a million people needed to be killed and neighbouring states collapse before the world would take action to stop the conflict.
John Ging, director of operations at the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said the humanitarian crisis was getting even worse with almost 2.8 million refugees in neighbouring states and 6.5 million displaced in Syria.
Over 3.5 million people are in areas where aid is blocked or hindered, and another 240,000 are under siege, he told a news conference in Geneva. Moreover, Damascus has a deliberate strategy of denying medical care to the wounded by removing anything that could be used as medical supplies from convoys, Ging added, calling this “an abomination, indescribably unacceptable in 2014.”
“The valid question to ask those political leaders is ... how many poor people will you accept to be killed before you do something different?” he asked.
“It’s 5,000 a month at the moment and it’s over 150,000 already. Is it 200,000? Is it a quarter of a million? Is it a million people?”
Reuters
