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Shelling and air strikes resume in Aleppo

In Aleppo’s rebel-held east, dozens of civilians left the battered district of Bustan al-Qasr early on Saturday morning, an AFP correspondent said.

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One of the doctors killed was the hospital’s last pediatrician, MSF said.

A Syrian military source said Aleppo was excluded from the newly announced truces “because in Aleppo there are terrorists who have not stopped hitting the city and its residents …”

The situation Aleppo showing the situation on 30 April 2016.

Russian news agencies quoted an opposition figure saying the new truce would also apply to Aleppo, but there was no separate confirmation of this. “We must all be ashamed this is happening on our watch”, O’Brien said, urging world powers to salvage the truce.

In Geneva, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said the latest reports of civilian deaths in Syria revealed a “monstrous disregard for civilian lives by all parties to the conflict”.

It also contributed to the break up of peace talks in Geneva, which the main opposition walked out of last week. The State Department did not confirm the length of time of the agreement, but officials said the goal was to extend the ceasefire in those areas for as long as possible and eventually include Aleppo in the agreement.

“After five years of war in Syria the health infrastructure has been decimated”, it said. Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations envoy for Syria, characterized the talks as “barely alive”, the Guardian reports.

Since Russia joined the war previous year with air strikes against Assad’s enemies, battlefield momentum has shifted in the government’s favour.

An Arabic hashtag translating as “Aleppo is burning” was re-tweeted hundreds of thousands of times on Twitter alongside pictures of children being pulled from smoking rubble.

The hospital was in an area of town held by rebels, whom Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime is relentlessly attacking.

“They (the regime) are deliberately targeting medical centres again and again – it is very clear”.

The editorial noted that while the USA and Russian Federation managed to pass UN Security Council resolution 2254, which called for an immediate end to sieges and the bombing of civilians in Syria, the use of these tactics has continued.

Observatory director Rami Abdulrahman said government-held areas of Aleppo were “a bit quieter today”, but that rebels were still firing shells intermittently. “But it is up to an investigator and it is for a court to take that decision on whether it is a war crime or not”.

“These ongoing and systematic attacks are an explicit violation of humanitarian principles and worldwide humanitarian law, which stress the protection of medical facilities and humanitarian workers against military operations”, the global Doctors Association, a Syria-focused NGO that is based in Turkey, said in a statement.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said the attack was “unacceptable” and warned that Aleppo was being “pushed further to the brink of humanitarian disaster”.

Airstrikes on rebel-held areas of Aleppo and shelling of government-held areas of Syria’s largest city resumed after a brief lull on Friday as the USA and Russian Federation consulted to shore up a collapsing truce after a week of violence.

On Friday, at least 11 people were killed in regime bombardment of the city’s eastern districts, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

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In fact, there does appear to be a U.S. Plan B, according to the Wall Street Journal, which recently reported that it involved supplying more powerful weapons to the Syrian rebels, possibly including missiles that could shoot down Syrian planes and helicopters. According to Syrian state television, rebels attacked government-held territory with rockets and artillery fire, killing three worshippers as they were exiting a mosque.

A man with a baby flees an airstrike in Aleppo