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Most of the photos I received this week from Eastern Ghouta in Syria are considered too graphic for you to see.
Key points:
- Eastern Ghouta is under siege from Syrian Government forces trying to get the territory back from opposition fighters
- The UN estimates about 400,000 people are trapped there
- More than 229 people, including 58 children, have been killed in the past four days, the Syria Observatory of Human Rights says
The bodies of a whole family wrapped in funeral shrouds, two parent sized shapes next to four tiny little children sized corpses.
Four dead little boys lying on the cold floor of a medical clinic.
Their jumpers have ridden up so you can see their tiny skinny waists.
None appear to be wearing shoes; were they killed at home in their beds?
A baby girl on a doctor's table about six months old wearing a smiling Winnie the Pooh jumpsuit, missing the lower half of one of her legs.
In the past week, Eastern Ghouta has been pounded daily by Syrian regime and Russian warplanes.
It has been one of the bloodiest episodes in this horrific war in years, with more than 229 people killed in just the past four days including 58 children, according to the Syria Observatory of Human Rights.
Alun Macdonald, the charity Save the Children's spokesman in the Middle East, says the besieged rebel-held area near Damascus is the worst place in the world right now for children.
"What we are seeing in Eastern Ghouta at the moment certainly rivals anything else we are seeing anywhere in the intensity of the bombing and the number of casualties being reported," Mr Macdonald told the ABC.
"The level of destruction in terms of homes and schools — children who are too hungry to go to school because of the siege, trapped in bunkers unable to go outside because of the bombing. The desperation in their voices when we speak to them in Eastern Ghouta at the moment is very extreme compared to other places."
Save the Children partners with Syrian aid groups inside Ghouta who are trying to run schools and clinics inside the besieged area.
Mr Macdonald says from just the schools that Save the Children supports in Eastern Ghouta, at least 11 pupils have been killed in bombings in the last few weeks.
"There may well be more those are just the ones we know of," he says.
"Many of them have been killed in their homes, or on the way to school or playing with their friends. It really is the case that in Eastern Ghouta at the moment, nowhere is really safe."
Eastern Ghouta is under siege from Syrian government forces, who are trying to get the territory back from opposition fighters.
Aid can't get in and people can't get out, including critically ill children who need lifesaving medical treatment.
Since November the United Nations' requests to deliver aid to Ghouta have been continuously refused by President Bashar al-Assad's regime.
"This is a huge area on the edge of Damascus and you have a population that has been denied aid, where children are being bombed, where children are starving, where sick children can't get treatment and it is just a few miles away from the centre of Damascus where there are warehouses full of food, hospitals that could treat these children, but because of the siege that's not being allowed," Mr Macdonald said.
The UN estimates 400,000 people are trapped inside Eastern Ghouta, many of them increasingly running out of food.
Save the Children says many essential items in Ghouta now cost nearly 800 per cent more than in government-controlled areas just a few kilometres away.
Most families are trying to survive on just one meal a day, and people are burning plastic furniture as they have run out of fuel.
"We speak to teachers in the schools we work with where a lot of the children are so weak from hunger they are fainting in class, because they are so malnourished with so little food," Mr Macdonald says.
UNICEF says 12 per cent of children under five years old in Eastern Ghouta suffer from malnutrition — the highest rate of acute malnourishment that has ever been recorded in Syria since the beginning of the conflict.
Syria's war has brought unimaginable horrors in the past seven years.
As the conflict now enters its eighth year, it is hard to imagine that this war could get any worse, but that is exactly what is happening right in Ghouta.
"Just when you think you have seen the worst, something manages to come along and shock," Mr Macdonald says.
"What is happening to people there is just horrendous."
Topics: unrest-conflict-and-war, community-and-society, family-and-children, maternal-and-child-health, child-health-and-behaviour, children, syrian-arab-republic
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