(Newswire.net — January 18, 2016) — Although UNICEF said that there are cases of severe malnutrition among children in the Syrian city of Madaya, which has been under siege for months by Assad’s army, the International Commitee Red Cross claim that they have not found any starving children.
In addition, the heartbreaking footage of a young girl that starved to death seems to be fabricated, Al-Masdar News reports. According to Al-Masdar, the girl is not even Syrian, but Lebanese, safe and sound with her parents.
Among reports of severe starvation cases in Madaya that are flooding the social networks, there is one video published on YouTube named the Official Statement by Red Cross on Syria – Zabadani, Madaya, Fouaa & Kafaraya, which tells a different story.
“The International Committee of the Red Cross, cannot confirm the information that are [sic] been published on social media, or reported on traditional media,” a Red Cross representative said in an amateur video, shot in front of the official Red Cross flag.
“However, we cannot also exclude any of the information that relate to the suffering of the civilian population,” the Red Cross representative said in the video, stressing that they still are not granted access to the area.
“We cannot confirm those pictures published on a [sic] social media, but we have to be granted access to those places in order to see what is the medical state of the people there, what kind of humanitarian supplies they need most, where the reparation of water structure needs to be done, and who needs to be urgently treated by our medical doctors,” the ICRC representative said in the video. He added that the truth is that people in the towns under siege are cut off from basic supplies such as food, water, medicine and electricity.
“This is a case of a mainstream media selective humanity [sic]. They cry crocodile tears over Madaya and ignoring [sic] Fouaa and Kafraya,” one Syrian girl posted on YouTube, explaining that those two towns have been under siege for years by US backed rebels lead by Al Qaeda members.
In the same video, it was explained that the picture of the starved boy that went viral was not a photo taken in Medaya, but was taken in 2013 in another city. Every photo claimed to be from Medaya was actually from elsewhere, from another period.
The most shocking picture, of a once beautiful young girl that allegedly turned into a living corpse, then died of starvation, turned out not only that she wasn’t from Medaya, but not even from Syria at all. She is from Lebanon. In a video disputing starvation allegation, the girl says that her picture was taken from her Facebook page.
Officially, the U.N. reported there is only one confirmed case, a 53-old man that died from starvation in Medaya