(BRUZGI, Belarus) — Parsa Akram now lives with her mother, father and brother under a warehouse shelf. The space is about 2 meters wide. The 18-year-old and her mother sleep in a tent, her brother and father on the ground.

They are among hundreds of people — mostly from Iraqi Kurdistan — now living in a warehouse about a mile from Belarus’ border with Poland, caught up in the migration crisis that, although eased, has not ended.

The warehouse in Bruzgi is not a refugee center; it is just a packing warehouse, the kind Amazon or FedEx would use to store goods. People are now living on the stacks of shelves that would normally hold packages. Whole families like the Akrams are packed into the spaces under the shelving; others have clambered up to make nest-like beds in the higher levels.

“It’s not a camp,” Parsa said. “[It’s] a chicken house!”

For months, thousands of migrants, mostly from the Middle East, have found themselves trapped between Belarus and Poland amid a crisis allegedly engineered by Belarus’ authoritarian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, who is accused of luring them to Europe’s border in an effort to retaliate against the European Union for its support for Belarus’ pro-democracy movement.

The migrants, mainly trying to reach western Europe, have been blocked by Poland and neighboring Lithuania, stranding them in forests along the border often for weeks, without food or shelter.

The crisis came to a head three weeks ago, when Belarus marched hundreds of migrants to a crossing point with Poland. Scenes of migrants sleeping in the open air in freezing temperatures and then violent clashes with Polish border guards, that Belarus was accused of inciting, attracted global attention.

Following the clashes, Belarus moved about 2,000 of the migrants to the warehouse, raising hopes the crisis might be easing.

Although better than the forest, the warehouse is not set up to house hundreds of people and after two weeks, conditions inside have rapidly deteriorated. When ABC News reporters visited this weekend, people were sleeping on the floor in sleeping bags and sometimes thin tents, huddled together in dirty clothes. There is almost no sanitation, just a few chemical toilets. People wash themselves from two portable water tanks set up in a yard slick with mud and slush.

There are dozens of children, including some a few months old, and pregnant women.

This week, Belarus’ military brought a mobile sauna in a tent to allow people to wash, for many, the first time in a month. Belarus is also feeding people, giving them portions of buckwheat porridge twice a day. Food trucks, selling bread and snacks, are also set up.

Many people in the camp said they were sick. Several told ABC News they were suffering from food poisoning that they blamed on expired tinned food they said Belarusian authorities had given them.

There are also fears COVID-19 is in the camp. Belarusian authorities — who have been accused of undercounting COVID cases more generally — claim only two cases have been recorded in the warehouse. But the sound of coughing there is constant and ABC News reporters met a man being hospitalized with pneumonia on Sunday.

“People cannot wait any longer because the weather is getting really really cold. And all the people in here, they’re all sick, they’re getting sick so bad,” said Zanyar Dishad, an 18-year-old from Kurdistan who was with his family.

Lukashenko visited the camp last Friday, accompanied by state television cameras. In a speech, he told the migrants he would not force them to go home and would do everything to help them reach Europe. He also demanded Poland and Germany take them in.

Belarusian authorities told the migrants European countries will soon take them, though there is no indication when or if this will happen. Several migrants said they believed Lukashenko was holding talks with the EU to get them across the border and many were unaware of the reasons behind his conflict with Europe.

“He’s a very good man,” said Karwan Jamal, 26, who is living now in a tent with his wife and 7-year-old son.

“He’s very kind,” his wife Narin added. “Because Belarus all the time helps all people in here.”

In reality, Belarusian authorities refused to allow migrants out of the forests for weeks. Migrants in recent weeks have told ABC News that Belarusian border guards beat and robbed them, forcing them to cross back into Poland after being pushed back.

But EU efforts to cut off the flow of migrants to Belarus seem to be having an effect. The number of new arrivals has sharply and visibly dropped off. Belarus also appears to now be allowing people to leave the border area.

Hundreds of Iraqi citizens have also returned home in the last week on voluntary repatriation flights organized by Iraq’s government, which said 1,800 people have returned already.

Among them was Balsam Khalaf, 51, who said he had given up after five months of being pushed back and forth across the border, saying he had been roughed up by Belarusian, Polish and Lithuanian guards.

“We turned to a bouncing ball between both sides,” he said in an interview in Baghdad this week.

It is unclear how many migrants are still in Belarus, but it estimated to be at least a few thousand, including in the forests. Polish authorities accuse Belarus’ security forces of continuing to try to push dozens of people across the border each night.

Iraq’s government said it would hold a final repatriation flight this week because it said no one else wished to return. It said 3,000 people in total had expressed a desire to return.

At the camp, most people said they would not go back, despite the wretched conditions.

“Never ever,” said Narin.

ABC News’ Bader Katy contributed to this report from Baghdad and Tanya Stukalova contributed from Bruzgi, Belarus.

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(WASHINGTON) — Global health authorities are urging against the use of “blanket” travel bans in response to the threat of new coronavirus variants, as some nations have rushed to shutter incoming travel from southern African countries where the omicron variant has been detected.

The same health officials also warn that travel bans could have a negative effect on global efforts to respond to the pandemic, as nations may not wish to report new data and variants if they worry they could be seemingly punished for it by other countries barring their nationals from travel.

“Blanket travel bans will not prevent the international spread, and they place a heavy burden on lives and livelihoods,” the World Health Organization said in a statement Tuesday. “In addition, they can adversely impact global health efforts during a pandemic by disincentivizing countries to report and share epidemiological and sequencing data.”

Rather than blanket travel bans, the United Nations’ public health body urges countries to apply an “evidence-informed and risk-based approach” when implementing new travel restrictions.

The WHO’s advice comes after it said some 56 countries were reportedly implementing travel measures aimed at potentially delaying the importation of the omicron variant.

In the U.S., Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser, told ABC News’ “This Week” anchor George Stephanopoulos this past Sunday that travel bans could “slow things down,” but they won’t prevent a new variant from coming into the country.

“What you can do is you can delay it enough to get us better prepared,” Fauci said. “And that’s the thing that people need to understand. If you’re going to do the travel ban the way we’ve done now and that we’re implementing right now, utilize the time that you’re buying to fill in the gaps.”

Fauci’s remarks notably came before the U.S. confirmed the first case of the omicron variant in California on Wednesday.

“Travel bans are a very weak measure at best, but they’re most valuable very, very early on in the emergence of a new variant,” said Dr. John Brownstein, a professor at Harvard Medical School, chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor.

Travel bans can “buy you a little time,” he said, but only if they are implemented quickly and uniformly.

“The problem that we have here is that detection doesn’t mean being the epicenter of where the outbreak is,” Brownstein said. “Just because South Africa had incredible capacity to detect sequence doesn’t mean that necessarily this is where the most amount of cases occur.”

Some South African officials and scientists are calling the travel bans aimed at their country discriminatory and punitive.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa echoed the WHO’s sentiments in remarks to reporters while traveling to Nigeria on Tuesday, saying South Africa should not be “punished” for travel bans after being transparent with its omicron detection and research.

“These bans must be removed, they must be lifted,” Ramaphosa said. “And in fact, we have advanced in the world to a point where we now know when people travel, they should be tested like I was tested last night, and I’m happy to be tested when I arrive again. We’ve got the tools we’ve got the means to be able to deal with this.”

Ramaphosa added that the open travel is critical for the tourism industry around the world, which he said has been “really devastated.”

“And for us, the tourism industry is one of the key industries for southern Africa as well,” he said. “So, this is unfair, this is discriminatory against us, and they are imposing a very unfair punishment.”

One of the South African scientists who helped identify the omicron variant similarly blasted the travel bans imposed on southern African countries as a result of their discovery.

Tulio de Oliveira, director of the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation in Stellenbosch, South Africa, tweeted Monday night that he had “spent a big part” of his day speaking with genomic and biotech companies because “soon” his team “will run out of reagents as airplanes are not flying to South Africa.”

In a series of tweets last week, de Oliveira urged the world to “provide support to South Africa and Africa and not discriminate or isolate it.”

“We have been very transparent with scientific information. We identified, made data public, and raised the alarm as the infections are just increasing. We did this to protect our country and the world in spite of potentially suffering massive discrimination,” he tweeted.

In an interview with the New Yorker, de Oliveira added that he was “very upset” with the events that took place after the discovery, specifically related to travel bans.

“The U.K., after praising us for discovering the variant, then put out this absolutely stupid travel ban, and it has hoarded vaccines for the last year,” he told the outlet. “It’s trying to put the blame on vaccine hesitancy. It’s looking for a reason to fault Africa.”

Brownstein, who also noted that countries would feel penalized, rather than incentivized, for reporting new variants, suggested that testing pre- and post-travel and “intense surveillance” would be “incredibly helpful and probably more valuable than the travel restrictions.” Travel bans, he said, are “not the best tool.”

“We have really robust testing, we have other tools at our disposal,” he said. “We should be in a position where we don’t need to implement these things.”

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general, said in remarks Tuesday that it was “deeply concerning” that countries “are now being penalized by others for doing the right thing.”

“I well understand the concern of all countries to protect their citizens against a variant that we don’t yet fully understand,” he said. “But I am equally concerned that several Member States are introducing blunt, blanket measures that are not evidence-based or effective on their own, and which will only worsen inequities.”

Ultimately, Ghebreyesus called on nations to take “rational, proportional risk-reduction measures, in keeping with the International Health Regulations.”

“The global response must be calm, coordinated and coherent,” he added.

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