A Russian plan for a five-hour pause in fighting in Syria’s eastern Ghouta needs to be expanded to allow aid deliveries to enter and civilians and urgent medical cases to leave, United Nations officials said on Thursday.

In one of the fiercest onslaughts of Syria’s seven-year civil war, hundreds of people have died in 11 days of bombing of eastern Ghouta, a swathe of towns and farms outside Damascus that is the last major rebel-controlled area near the capital.

The Syrian army and its allies launched ground assaults on the edge of eastern Ghouta on Thursday, backed by a bombardment the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said killed 11 people.

“You are failing to help us help civilians in Syria,” U.N. humanitarian adviser Jan Egeland told diplomats from 23 states attending a weekly meeting in Geneva.

Extremely dire humanitarian situation

A Syrian soldier loyal to President Bashar al Assad is seen outside eastern Ghouta, in Damascus, Syria February 28, 2018. (Omar Sanadiki/REUTERS)

The humanitarian situation in eastern Ghouta, which has been under siege for more than five years, remains extremely dire, said Marwa Awad, an Egyptian-Canadian who is the head of communications for the UN’s World Food Programme in Syria.

“The siege is a very difficult condition to live in, especially when you have a lot of people,” Awad said.

(click to listen to the interview with Marwa Awad)

ListenEN_Interview_3-20180301-WIE30

UN ready to move in with aid

The UN estimates there are still about 400,000 people in the rebel-controlled enclave.

The WFP was able to visit the area on Feb. 14 and is preparing another major mission if the truce mandated by the UN Security Council takes hold, Awad said.

“We know that the rates of malnutrition among children under the age of five is very high, it’s in fact the highest in the whole country at 11.9 per cent,” Awad said. “We know that access to food is very difficult, severely difficult, because even though there is fertile land, people don’t have access to the land because of the security situation and danger on the ground.”

Canada calls for immediate ceasefire in Syria

During Thursday’s meeting of the humanitarian taskforce in Geneva, the United Nations received notice that it may get permission from Damascus to go to Douma in eastern Ghouta.

“We have 43 trucks standing by to go there and full warehouses to load into the trucks as soon as we get the permit,” Egeland said.

Life under siege

A young man cleans a damaged house in the besieged town of Douma, Eastern Ghouta, Damascus, Syria February 25, 2018. (Bassam Khabieh/REUTERS)

Many people told the WFP that they are living in their basements because of constant bombardment that has been escalating in the past two-three weeks, she said.

“This is why the World Food Program and all the humanitarian agencies inside Syria called for a cessation of hostilities for at least 30 days,” Awad said. “We have the capacity to support people as soon as the security on the ground allows us to.”

'Milestone mission'

One are of the country that the WFP has been able to finally get in to is the formerly besieged city of Deir ez-Zor in the country’s east, said Awad who took part in the two-day mission.

“This was a milestone mission for the UN team,” Awad said in an interview from Byblos, Lebanon, where she was attending a workshop.

The purpose of the two-day visit to Deir ez-Zor City and the eponymous governorate in eastern Syria was to assess the food security conditions and general humanitarian situation of the people who had been trapped there during the 17-months-long siege of the city by ISIS forces.

For over a year and a half,