Despite the frequent pledges from the Syrian government to ensure basic food stuff and diesel basically needed for heating, Syria's humanitarian crisis is set to deepen with onset of cold weather.

Ziyad Hazzaa, an official from the Ministry of Internal Trade, recently told local media that fuel stations are committed to providing half of their allocations for heating purposes at the regular prices.

He said the ministry is working to secure the basic necessities for citizens, such as fuel and bread, shrugging off claims about a possible fuel crisis this winter.

Nonetheless, Syrians are still lining up in front of gas distribution centers almost in all streets and have to register at fuel stations and wait for no less than a month to get diesel for heating.

Syrians also suffer from the long hours of outage. Minister of Electricity Imad Khamis stressed Monday that the repeated attacks carried out by armed terrorist groups against gas pipelines in the eastern city of Deiral-Zour caused the halting of operation at a number of plants with a total capacity of 1,500 megawatt.

Damascus blames the shortage in fuel on the sanctions imposed by the European Union (EU), which include an embargo on purchasing or transporting Syrian oil and prohibiting companies from dealing with Syria or investing in it, in addition to withdrawing experts and staff, suspending funding, and imposing sanctions on Syrian petroleum companies.

Hazzaa also dismissed claims about a looming food crisis though confessing that the prices of consumer commodities have nudged up between 35 to 65 percent since the start of the crisis in mid- March of 2011. This has made many commodities out of reach for most Syrians.

The government, however, has repeatedly stated that it is moving on with subsidies to keep prices low. But the 20-month-long crisis has displaced hundreds of Syrians and brought commercial and industrial life almost to a standstill.

Some basic items have started to disappear from stores' shelves, allegedly because of the EU sanctions and the difficulty to bring some items into the capital from hot areas across the country.

It is now not peculiar to see beggars everywhere especially near traffic lights, with some searching in trash bins for leftovers.

"My household of 14 people had to give up meat more than five months ago as the price spiraled out of reach," said a woman in her 30s while moving from one car to another at the traffic light, begging for some money.

Rising food prices have hit hard this war-torn country, where the cost of most food stuff has shot up 50 percent within few months.

The World Food Programme said last month it plans to continue providing food for 1.5 million people in Syria until at least June next year, a sign it expects hunger to persist in a protracted civil war.

Experts also warn that the situation for the poorest in Syria is dire, especially in the northeastern provinces where communities are buckling under double impact of the food crisis and a raging violence.

In October, a bulletin issued by the project of early warning of drought with the cooperation of the Syrian Ministry of Agriculture and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization showed that 41 percent of households in Syria's remote areas go through difficult conditions.

Drought in those areas has been exacerbated by two years of unrest and restrictions on aid access by all parties.

According to the pro-government newspaper al-Watan, most of the families in the desert and rural areas are suffering, with more than 50 percent of them passing through very difficult living conditions with increasing financial burdens, especially in the central province of Homs, and the northeastern provinces of Hasakah and Deir al-Zour. Endi