Unicef: Teen starves to death in Madaya

The UN children’s agency said it has witnessed cases of severe malnutrition among children in a besieged Syrian town and the death of a teenager “in front of our eyes.”

Hanaa Singer, Unicef representative in Syria, said in a statement on Friday that the 16-year-old identified as Ali passed away on Thursday in the Madaya’s clinic of severe malnutrition.

“They took us down to the makeshift hospital and we went to the basement” where two young men shared a bed, Ms Singer, told AFP. She said the two boys’ bodies “were skeleton-like”.

A Unicef doctor appr-oached one of the tee-nagers who looked particularly weak and noticed his pulse had stopped. “She checked him out, there was no pulse, so she started resuscitating. One, tw-o, three times, then she looked at me and said, ‘He’s gone.’ And she closed his eyes,” Ms Singer said by phone from Syria.

According to her, the young man next to Ali began frantically whispering, “Did he die Did he die ” Ms Singer said Ali’s family, sitting nearby, appeared so exhausted “that they can’t even mourn anymore. They were crying silently but helplessly.”

Ali became the latest person to die of malnutrition in Madaya, which is under a crippling government siege. More than two dozen people in the rebel-held town have reportedly starved to death since early December.

Aid agencies entered Madaya with a convoy on Thursday to deliver desperately-needed humanitarian aid, in a second such operation this week.

Meanwhile, Russia said on Friday it had launched “humanitarian operations” in Syria where it is carrying ou-t a bombing campaign against ISIS, claiming peaceful life was slowly returning to the war-torn country.

“The inhabitants are gradually coming back to Syrian cities and peaceful life is returning,” General Sergei Rudskoi, a senior Russian General Staff official, told reporters.