BEIRUT // Air raids have hit four makeshift hospitals in Syria’s battered Aleppo city, doctors said on Sunday, jeopardising medical care for more than 200,000 desperate civilians in rebel-held areas.
The bombardment since Saturday has worsened the plight of residents living in besieged eastern neighbourhoods of the city, where food and medical supplies are becoming increasingly scarce.
The hospitals, as well as a blood bank that was hit, were located in the Al Shaar neighbourhood, said the Independent Doctor’s Association, a group of Syrian doctors that supports clinics in Aleppo.
It said a two-day-old baby was killed in the children’s hospital when his oxygen supply was cut after a raid during the early hours of Sunday.
It was the second strike on the same hospital in about nine hours, according to the IDA.
“After the second strike, we had to move him [the baby] downstairs to the bomb shelter, and that’s why he died,” said Malika, the head nurse at the children’s hospital.
“The hospital is severely damaged and it’s not the first time.”
Footage posted by the IDA of the strike’s aftermath showed agitated doctors carrying a tiny baby in a room lined with incubators, with sandbags piled high just outside the entrance.
All four hospitals and the blood bank were out of service on Sunday, the city’s opposition-run “health directorate” confirmed.
It warned that doctors “are not able to get any wounded people out or any medicine in to this devastated city”.
Opposition-controlled areas of Aleppo are regularly hit by regime and Russian air strikes.
According to the World Health Organisation, Syria was the most dangerous place for health care workers to operate last year, with 135 attacks on health facilities and workers in 2015.
Heavy air strikes on eastern Aleppo resumed on Sunday morning after a brief pause.
The streets were empty except for ambulances speeding to the site of fresh bombing raids with their sirens wailing.
According to the IDA, five hospitals are left operating in Aleppo’s eastern neighbourhoods, which have been devastated by a regime siege that took hold earlier this month.
“Besiegement and the decimation of health care constitute war crimes. We demand an immediate end to and accountability for the collective punishment the city faces,” the group said.
Marianne Gasser, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Syria, said that learning of the hospital strikes had filled her with “overwhelming despair”.
“I think about the people who died, and keep dying, again and again. I think about the patients and their families. I feel for the doctors who want to help but can’t anymore,” she said.
Repeated attempts – particularly by the United States and regime ally Russia – at securing a political settlement to Syria’s war, based on a teetering ceasefire, have failed.
Moscow and Washington are nominally co-chairs of international efforts to bring president Bashar Al Assad’s regime to the negotiating table with opposition groups.
The United Nations has set August as the target date for the resumption of talks.
On Sunday, the Syrian foreign ministry said Damascus “is ready to continue the Syrian-Syrian dialogue without any preconditions, in the hopes that this dialogue will lead to a comprehensive solution”.
The statement, carried by state news agency Sana and quoting a foreign ministry official, also said Syria would be “ready to coordinate air operations against terrorism as part of the agreement between Russia and the United States”.
Moscow has sought to work with Washington on military action against ISIL and Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Al Nusra.
The US-led coalition has carried out air strikes against ISIL since September 2014, and Russia began its own bombing campaign in support of Mr Al Assad’s forces a year later.
US secretary of state John Kerry held marathon meetings last week with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, and Russian president Vladimir Putin in Moscow.
They struck an agreement on “concrete steps” to salvage the failing truce and fight extremistfactions, but did not announce details.
Mr Kerry and Mr Lavrov are expected to meet again on the sidelines of an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meeting in Laos this week.
* Agence France-Presse
