U.N. officials said Thursday humanitarian convoys are ready to go at any time to Syria’s northern city of Aleppo and other areas where people are badly in need of aid, but are unable to move until they get authorization from the Syrian government.

Special envoy Jan Egeland told reporters in Geneva he hopes deliveries can be made to Aleppo on Friday.

“Can well-fed, grown men please stop putting political, bureaucratic and procedural roadblocks for brave humanitarian workers that are willing and able to go to serve women, children, wounded civilians in besieged and crossfire areas?”

The deliveries are part of a cease-fire agreement brokered by the United States and Russia, and which went into effect on Monday.

Egeland said the halt in fighting is largely holding.

“The killing has been greatly reduced,” he said. “Attacks on schools, attacks on hospitals have stopped.”

U.N. envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura said the agreement remains a potential “game-changer” for the conflict in Syria, which is in its sixth year. But he too expressed frustration at the lack of aid deliveries, saying there is no excuse for the delay.

“These are days we should have used for convoys because we have no fighting,” he said. “We cannot let days of this reduction in violence to be wasted by not moving forward on that.”

Mistura also noted that under this agreement, the trucks of aid are supposed to be allowed to reach their destinations without inspections. That would circumvent what has been a criticism of earlier aid efforts when both government forces and rebels were accused of blocking certain items from reaching civilians.
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