The Latest: UN Syria envoy not 'giving up' as Ghouta reels
BEIRUT (AP) - The Latest on developments regarding Syria (all times local):
3:45 p.m.
The United Nations envoy for Syria is insisting that a government-led assault on eastern Ghouta must not devolve into a "copycat" of the bloody siege on northern Aleppo in late 2016.
U.N. and other aid officials have faced an inability to get humanitarian assistance into the rebel-held region east of Damascus and escort out the critically sick and injured despite a U.N. Security Council resolution passed over the weekend calling for a 30-day cease-fire.
The envoy, Staffan de Mistura, says: "We cannot afford to have the luxury of giving up. So any type of feeling that the U.N. is frustrated: Forget it.
"Otherwise, (this) becomes a copycat of Aleppo," he said.
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2:55 p.m.
A top U.N. aid official says five-hour daily pauses in fighting in Syria's embattled eastern Ghouta region laid out under a "unilateral" plan by Russia are not enough.
Jan Egeland also says the U.N. Security Council resolution over the weekend calling for a 30-day cease-fire has done little to improve the situation in the rebel-held region east of Damascus. Egeland says: "Since it was adopted, it did not get better - it got worse."
Egeland, who heads humanitarian aid matters in the office of the U.N. Syria envoy, said the Russian plan for the five-hour pauses was "positive" but insufficient.
"I know of no humanitarian actor - zero humanitarian actor - who thinks that five hours is enough for us to be able to deliver relief into eastern Ghouta and to organize orderly medical evacuations out," he says.
He said a meeting of U.N.' s humanitarian task force for Syria earlier Thursday discussed the issue of: "Can we sit down now with Russia and others and see whether we can help make this pause/initiative meet humanitarian standards for a pause and a corridor."
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10:45 a.m.
The Russian military is accusing Syria's rebels of shelling a humanitarian corridor that Moscow set up with the Syrian government, offering residents of Damascus' besieged eastern suburbs a way out of the embattled enclave.
Maj. Gen. Vladimir Zolotukhin told Russia news agencies on Thursday that the militants who control the suburbs - an area known as eastern Ghouta - are shelling the route, manned by Syrian and Russian forces, and preventing evacuations.
Syrian state news agency SANA said on Wednesday that some shells had landed near the corridor but reported no injuries.
The accusations come on the third and possibly last day of a Russia-ordered "humanitarian pause" in the fighting in the area, known as eastern Ghouta, but no civilians have used the lull to leave the rebel-held suburbs.