Acute food shortages have reached desperate levels in the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus. Leading religious figures in the camps have issued a fatwa permitting the killing and consumption of cats, dogs, mice, rats and donkeys. “We have been under siege for three months. There is nothing left to eat. This is what has become of us,” said a resident of Yarmouk as he prepared to kill a dog for his family following the fatwa (religious ruling). Residents are struggling to keep children from dying. Jana Ahmad Hassan is less than three months old. She is severely malnourished and faces starvation. She was born in the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, Yarmouk. For more than three months the camp has been under siege from the Syrian armed forces. In the face of scarcities this has brought, Jana’s life now hangs in the balance. “For god’s sake my son, I have a starving baby girl in the camp,” her mother pleaded with one of the soldiers at a checkpoint. “I need to get some milk for her and food for me or she will die.” Her pleas were violently rebuked. “You think you are a mother? If you understood anything, you wouldn’t have gone out of the camp and left her at home,” the soldier said. She was sent empty-handed back into the camp. With Jana’s mother failing to produce milk, her father has searched tirelessly for formula for the child but he has repeatedly been told that there isn’t a single box to be had in the south of Syria. Many rebel-held areas such as Yarmouk are suffering from acute shortages of food under the siege.
Posted on: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 12:45:29 +0000
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