Two aid convoys destined for Syria’s Aleppo, with enough supplies to feed 185,000 people for a month, remained stuck in Turkey on Monday as rebels said a landmark ceasefire had effectively ended.
The UN has said it does not have sufficient security guarantees from all sides in the conflict, now in its sixth year, to be able to deliver the 40 trucks of aid to eastern Aleppo, which is held by rebels battling to topple President Bashar al-Assad.
The aid has been sitting at the border for nearly a week, as the patchy seven-day ceasefire was punctuated by fighting and air raids, with all sides accusing each other of violating it.
The UN also wants to deliver aid to other hard-to-reach parts of the country, but says it has not received the necessary permissions from the government to proceed.
“They completely wasted time. They had a really good opportunity in the past week, with low casualty numbers and low bombing rates, to be able to send in aid, but we haven’t seen that,” Hadeel al-Shalchi, Syria researcher with Human Rights Watch (HRW), told al Jazeera.
A rebel official told the Reuters news agency that truce, brokered by the US and Russia, had ended, and there was no hope the eastern Aleppo aid would be delivered.
According to a timetable set by Moscow and Washington, the ceasefire was due to officially expire at 1600 GMT on Monday. The Syrian army, though, said last week it would expire at midnight on Sunday.
Up to 275,000 people remain trapped in eastern Aleppo – Syria’s most populous city – without food, water, proper shelter or medical care, said UN Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs Stephen O’Brien.