A senior U.N. official warns conditions in Libya are continuing to deteriorate and life-saving assistance is urgently needed.

In launching the appeal, U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Libya, Panos Moumtzis, says his main concern is for the western part of Libya where 80 percent of the population lives. “Our concern for the west is that the situation in the west due to the sanctions, with the low availability of medical supplies, of food supplies, the fuel embargo, the cash flow shortages-it is really like a time bomb ticking where the longer the crisis lasts, the more grave the humanitarian situation is,” said Moumtzis. ~Voice of America

As usual, a heavy-handed sanctions regime that was supposed to pressure the regime to capitulate to outside demands is hitting the civilian population first and doing far more damage to the population than to the regime. We now have a spectacle of a policy aimed at averting humanitarian disaster in one part of the country helping contribute to the worsening of a humanitarian crisis for the entire country. As long as hostilities continue, large-scale relief and evacuation efforts are essentially impossible, which means that the continuation of the Libyan war is harming the civilian population of the entire country for the sake of achieving the political success of one faction in a civil war.