Madaya was the worst off of all the besieged towns in Syria, relief workers say. As early as October, locals in the town had been raising alarms about the dire humanitarian situation there.*
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But the general public could not have known this, because OCHA classified the bulletin as “Internal, Not for Quotation.” OCHA had no immediate comment on why the update, leaked to*Foreign Policy, wasn’t published.
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When Yacoub el-Hillo, the U.N.’s humanitarian coordinator for Syria, addressed reporters on Jan. 12, a day after leading the first convoy into the town, he described Madaya residents as “a people that are desperate; a people that are cold; a people that are hungry; a people that have almost lost hope” — but he blamed no one in particular for this state of affairs and made no mention of the Lebanese paramilitary group Hezbollah, which in fact is maintaining the siege against Syrian civilians in Madaya
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There’s tension within the international relief community over OCHA’s method of determining which areas are besieged and which are “hard to reach” — a determination that carries weight because a siege that deprives civilians of the goods they need for survival can be prosecuted as a war crime. The U.N. designates Fuaa and Kefraya, where there were no reported deaths from starvation, as besieged towns and Madaya, where there were, as “hard to reach.”
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