“The other hospitals and the blood bank were in an area where there were air strikes rather than them been apparently directly targeted”.
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Syrian government forces and their allies cut the main road into rebel-held parts of the country, known as the Castello road, last week – laying siege to opposition-held parts of Aleppo. The country’s largest city and former commercial center, Aleppo has been contested since July 2012.
The UN’s Syrian peace envoy, Staffan de Mistura, is due to discuss the plan in talks with Russian and the United States in Geneva on Tuesday.
French Ambassador Francois Delattre compared Aleppo’s plight to that of Sarajevo during the Bosnian war and said “the Security Council simply can not accept such war crimes – yes war crimes – to repeat again”.
A statement from the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF on Tuesday condemned weekend air raids on four hospitals in Aleppo, calling them “a blatant violation of global humanitarian law” that may amount to war crimes. Japan’s ambassador, Koro Bessho, who holds the council presidency, said there was “overwhelming support for the idea” among the 15 council members.
More than 280,000 people have been killed in Syria and more than half its population has been displaced since the conflict began with the brutal repression of anti-government protests in 2011.
Russia’s Ria-Novosti news agency said Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov would represent Moscow.
Last week US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov agreed on “concrete steps” to salvage the failing truce and fight jihadist factions, without announcing details.
The February ceasefire between the government and a number of rebel groups but not Islamic State – which was brokered by the USA and Russian Federation – is largely in tatters.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 10 civilians had been killed in multiple air strikes on the town of rebel-held Atareb in Aleppo province.
Mahmud Talha, the head of Shaam News Network, for his part, said that regime and Russian warplanes have launched an average 25 raids per day over the past two weeks.
One boy was pulled out alive but the rest of his family were killed and their bodies remained under a collapsed building, he added. The city, once Syria’s most populous, is divided between government forces and anti-government militias.
The medical facilities are all in the opposition-held eastern side of the city, which is besieged by government forces.
The government regularly bombs the east of the city, and rebels often fire rockets into western districts.
The government forces killed 71 civilians, including 18 children and 11 women, of which 14, including two children, who were killed as they were trying to pass the Castillo Road.
The United Nations says there are almost half a million people in besieged areas in Syria and an estimated 4.5 million Syrians are in so-called “hard-to-reach” areas.
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He said he received an email on Monday morning from a doctor at Aleppo children’s hospital saying “if nothing is done we are surely facing death”.
