An emergency coordinator for Doctors Without Borders told CNN that the humanitarian situation in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol is deteriorating by the day.
"We have staff, MSF [Medecins Sans Frontières] staff, who are currently in Mariupol who we've been able to keep contact with, although that contact is getting harder and harder to keep every day. They confirmed to us there's been no access to clean drinking water for over a week now," Alex Wade told CNN's Jim Acosta.
"They're using snow and rain water, they're breaking into heating systems to access the water in heating systems, but for many, water has already run out and so has the food for many people. The only people left with food are those who have stocks that they're rationing," he said from Vinnytsia, Ukraine.
"I think we can say we're in the disaster phase now," he added.
Staff on the ground in Mariupol have told Wade that people are dying from lack of access to medicine, He said.
"The next phase we will see people who potentially could die from dehydration and hunger or ... fleeing from the city trying to find food and water and dying from the violence outside the city," he said.
Wade said there's a "sense of panic" in the city right now.
"We had communication with a staff member today who was telling us that they've [been] ... taking the dead bodies of their neighbors and burying them in their own yards, just so that their own neighbors will have a burial and not remain dead on the streets," he said.
While evacuation corridors were slated to take place for the city Saturday, the lack of available communication hampers safety efforts, he said.
"When there are discussions around humanitarian corridors or safe passage out of the city, many people are uninformed and they don't know about it because there's no communication inside the city. There's no phone network. There's no internet," he said.