Between the southern border of Syria, Jordan and Iraq lies a stretch of land akin to purgatory. More than 40,000 people are stranded in Rukban, almost 300km from Damascus.

Families here are cut off from the world, facing hunger and lacking healthcare, transport and education.

At the height of the Syrian crisis, many Syrians fled their towns and villages in rural eastern Homs and Palmyra, and moved south to Rukban. Some hoped to cross into Jordan while others camped out in the rocky desert, aiming to return home once the fighting stops.

Four years later, those displaced are still in Rukban, dependent on lifesaving humanitarian assistance and praying for a solution to their plight. Their fate hangs in the balance following an announcement to open up a humanitarian corridor.

Last week, I visited the isolated settlement for the first time when the World Food Programme took part in a UN convoy to Rukban joined by the Syrian Arab Red Crescent. Over the course of eight days, the convoy distributed urgently needed food to feed the population in the settlement for one month, as well as nutrition to prevent malnutrition in 6,000 children.

The Rukban settlement is in an isolated desert region. Nothing grows there, and the only food comes from the WFP’s monthly delivery

Other UN agencies delivered shelter, medical and sanitary supplies to a population withering away in the harsh winter of the Syrian desert and where the ground, caked with mud from torrential rains, immobilises everything, and nothing grows.

Around the corner of one mud hut, I ran into 10-year-old Bilal on a mission to collect rubbish for his family to burn to keep warm.

“I am constantly hungry and thirsty,” Bilal said, his face burned from the daily exposure to extremely cold temperatures and freezing windstorms. Trailing behind him was his friend Khaled, who was dragging the carcass of a small, dead dog tied to a rope. Khaled told me he has no other toys to play with as his parents cannot afford to buy him any.

Rukban is one of the most remote locations in Syria, extremely hard to reach. The majority of the families that have ended up there are of poor backgrounds, living in ragged tents, or structures made of mud that dissolve in heavy rain.

“Time stood still four years ago when I came to Rukban,” 18-year-old Rukia told me. “Hunger has tormented us and my family has survived on charity – and now this assistance.

“We came out here in 2014 to stay for a week or so until it was safe to go back to Palmyra. The weeks have turned into years and we are desperate to get out. I feel we are being punished for trying to survive.”

Six different tribes live inside Rukban, scattered across the 15km that make up the settlement. We drove far distances to reach the distribution sites that were set up to offload the humanitarian aid. At one of these, a sea of haggard faces – young and old women and men as well as children – lined up to collect their aid packages.

People who have tried to leave Rukban spoke of smugglers demanding large sums of money to take them back into Syria. Yet with poverty the norm in the settlement and very few jobs around, the majority cannot afford to do this.

The camp’s economy runs on a few traders who smuggle in food and basic household items and sell them at very high prices. The cost of bread alone is eight times what it is in Damascus. Medicine is in very short supply and not a single doctor exists in the camp, leaving the entire population in the hands of untrained and inexperienced nurses.

A small boy walks past the mud wall of a dwelling in Rukban settlement, near the southern border of Syria

To survive the harsh winter, families send out their children to rummage through rubbish dumps for plastic and other material to burn, as the cost of firewood is beyond anyone’s reach.

With nothing to do except for roaming the desert and helping parents with fetching water or plastic, children inside Rukban risk becoming a lost generation. Education is almost non-existent in the settlement and the few makeshift classrooms that have been set up are too far away for many mothers to send their kids to.

“I fear for my children and the children stuck here. There’s no structure to their day and they are getting used to being idle and illiterate,” one man said to me.

UN agencies have brought educational supplies into Rukban as well as vaccines to support children. However, these supplies will run out. It is essential that humanitarians can continue to reach the 40,000 people in Rukban in a regular and sustained manner to address their needs and prevent further deterioration of their conditions until a viable solution is found to ease their suffering without jeopardising their safety.

• Marwa Awad, working with the World Food Programme in Syria, was among the humanitarian representatives recently allowed into the remote settlement of Rukban, or “the Berm”, along Syria’s border with Jordan