Millions of Syrians could go hungry, warns UN
December 5, 2014, 5:09 pm

Many Syrian Refugees are at risk as temperatures fall during the winter months in the Middle East, the UN says [Xinhua]

Unless it receives $64 million in immediate aid, the UN says, some 1.7 million Syrian refugees could begin to go hungry.

The UN’s World Food Program began a three-day fund-raising campaign (ending Friday night) which calls on donations of at least $1 a day and appeals to social media resources such as Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook users are being asked to replace their profile pictures with a WFP badge representing the food drive.

The UN appeal comes amid new reports from the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights which revealed that some 202,000 people have now been killed in the civil war there.

“We have documented the killing of 202,354 people since March 2011,” Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP, adding that more than 130,000 of them were combatants.

This has been a difficult year for UN relief agencies as refugee crises appear to be on the increase in Syria, Iraq, Ukraine and the Central African Republic.

UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson told the media that the world body now needs some $18 billion in funding to assist the displaced and needy.

The WFP on Friday said that many of the refugees are living in dire conditions and any cuts to the assistance they currently receive would be “devastating”.

The UN and other relief agencies have also warned that with winter coming in most Middle Eastern states hundreds of thousands of refugees are at risk of floods, near freezing temperatures, and lack of access to food.

Last year, harsher than normal temperatures threatened the lives of refugees in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.

To donate to the fund-raising go to: wfp.org/forsyrianrefugees

Source: Agencies