It is not all over

The scale of suffering across Syria has reached unprecedented levels, with access to aid blocked in three major population centres, growing displacement and more than 13 million people in need across the country, the UN has said.

The organisation called on Tuesday for a one-month ceasefire to ease what it described as an “extreme situation” that “we haven’t seen before” at any point during the war, which is soon to enter its eighth year.

The UN’s assistant secretary general and humanitarian coordinator in Syria, Panos Moumtzis, said the organisation had been almost powerless to respond to a “dramatic deterioration in the humanitarian situation” over the past two months in particular, when access to people in opposition areas had been blocked by Syrian government officials.organisation

The siege had been most acute in East Ghouta on the outskirts of Damascus, where 400,000 people – 94% of all those under regime blockade – have not received deliveries of food, water or medicine since late November. Ghouta, an opposition stronghold throughout the conflict, has been heavily bombed by Russian and Syrian jets for the past month

Elsewhere, airstrikes continued to hammer Idlib province in northern Syria, where more than 2 million people, at least half of them displaced from other parts of the country, are hemmed in near the Turkish border.mid-December, when the most recent regime push on the area began. Almost half the area’s current population have been displaced from elsewhere in Syria; some were relocated as part of what Syrian officials call locally negotiated ceasefires, but which have nearly always followed long, crippling blockades. The UN said that in 2017 only 27% of its requests for access to opposition areas were granted by the Syrian government. As the military offensives have continued in Ghouta and Idlib, not a single request has been granted so far this year. Idlib was supposed to be a de-escalation zone, where hostilities were slowed or stopped to pave the way for negotiations.rt of what Syrian officials call locally negotiated ceasefires, but which have nearly always followed long, crippling blockades.

“There is a misperception that the de-escalation areas have resulted in peace and stability. If anything, these have been serious escalation areas,” said Moumtzis, who renewed a call for a political response to the crisis. “We feel really outraged. Dramatic developments have been building up and it has reached a point where we can no longer stay silent. These are multiple fires we have to respond to, with a dramatic deterioration in many places.”