As the world is consumed by North Korea, tax issues and Brexit, seven children with curable cancer are dying in Ghouta, Syria, for the want of drugs and nourishment.

Another 175 children also desperately need hospital treatment not available in Ghouta. Starved and besieged for four years, people are dying from malnutrition a stone’s – or rather grenade’s – throw from the bulging markets of Damascus and less than 60 minutes from the border with the free world.

Union of Syrian Medical Care and Relief Organizations (UOSSM) hospitals in Ghouta are on their knees with very few medicines left, and kind words for the dying children the only palliative care available.

President Vladimir Putin declared Ghouta a de-escalation zone earlier this year, but in effect it is the final killing zone in this most intractable and shameful of conflicts.

Ghouta is the one area that Bashar al-Assad has not been able to subdue. He has fought the rebels for four years in the most brutal hand-to-hand, street-by-street conflict, reminiscent of Stalingrad during the Second World War.

Every weapon has been used, in what appears to be the extermination of this population who will not surrender or go “quietly into the night”.

The deadly nerve agent sarin was dropped on 21 August this year, killing up to 1,500 and preventing the rebels from breaking into Assad’s Damascus. There are reliable reports that sarin is still being used to winkle out people from cellars and tunnels, in order to kill them in the open. Medieval siege techniques have resulted in no aid for four years. Children, in particular, are dying of starvation in sight of the Lebanese and Jordanian borders.

Last year at this time, we managed with UOSSM and other NGOs to get 500 children out of Aleppo to safety. We now appeal to at least give these seven children a chance of life by getting them to places which can treat their curable cancers.

This is very much in the hands of Putin and Assad and, no doubt, also the United Nations and members of the permanent five of the Security Council to encourage these two to do something humane at this supposedly compassionate time of year. The west in particular has left the majority of Syrian civilians to their own fate, and 500,000 are dead, 11 million displaced internally and four million are refugees.

For God’s sake, for the god of every religion, let’s try to end 2017 and begin 2018 with a bit of compassion and get these children out. We will go ourselves to Ghouta and get them on Christmas Day if need be. Come on, Mr Putin, Mr Assad, show some humility for the sake of humankind.

Dr David Nott and Hamish de Bretton-Gordon are directors of Doctors Under Fire and advisers to UOSSM