Syria regime shelling kills four schoolchildren in Eastern Ghouta- monitor says

Syrian regime shelling killed four schoolchildren and a man on Tuesday in the rebel-held besieged town of Jisreen east of the capital Damascus, a Britain-based monitor said, AFP reported.

"A shell fired by regime troops hit the entrance of a school in Jisreen just as children were leaving it, killing five people including four schoolchildren," the head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Rami Abdel Rahman, said.

The embattled Eastern Ghouta Suburbs have been endured to severe side and daily shelling for over 6 years.

On Monday, a convoy from the United Nations and Syrian Arab Red Crescent entered Ghouta towns, bringing aid to 40,000 people for the first time since June 2016, the United Nations said.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Twitter they had entered the towns of Kafra Batna and Saqba.

The Syrian Arab Red Crescent said in a separate tweet that the inter-agency convoy had 49 trucks.

They carried food, nutrition and health items for 40,000 people in need, OCHA spokesman Jens Laerke said. “The last time we reached these two locations were in June 2016,” he said.

A health worker in Saqba who was present when the convoy started to offload said that nine trucks of foodstuffs, including milk and peanut butter, and four trucks of medicines had arrived so far.

Technical specialists were on board to assess needs in the towns in order to plan a further humanitarian response, he said.

“More aid to complement today’s delivery is planned in the coming days,” Laerke added.

At least 1,200 children in eastern Ghouta suffer from malnutrition, with 1,500 others at risk, a spokeswoman for the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF said last week.

Bettina Luescher, spokeswoman of the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP), said the convoy carried nutrition supplies for 16,000 children.

Food, fuel and medicine once travelled across frontlines into the suburbs through a network of underground tunnels. But early this year, an army offensive nearby cut smuggling routes that provided a lifeline for around 300,000 people in the enclave east of the capital. (AFP, Reuters)