The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claimed that the shelling came from Syrian and Russian warplanes, which reportedly struck several districts in the rebel-held eastern part of Aleppo city.
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“We’re evaluating some mutual ideas in a constructive way, period”, he told reporters at the United Nations.
Western countries and global aid organisations said they feared for the lives of more than 250,000 civilians believed to be trapped in the rebel-held zone of Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city, which has been divided into opposition and Government sectors for years.
There were reports of as many as 40 buildings being destroyed in the attacks and a main water station damaged.
“They are using weapons that appear to be specifically for [bringing down] buildings”, said a senior official in an Aleppo-based rebel faction, the Levant Front.
An AFP correspondent inside the city said the barrage had flattened entire apartment blocks, overwhelming rescue teams from the White Helmets civil defence organisation.
Aid workers in the city said the death toll was higher, and deadly bombings were reported in other parts of northern Syria as well.
President Bashar al Assad has denied bombing civilians in the city, and has blamed the West for much of the destruction.
The Observatory said it was “a large-scale land offensive supported by Russian air strikes aimed at taking bit by bit the eastern sector of Aleppo and emptying it of its residents”.
Airstrikes continued Friday morning, with three out of four Syrian Civil Defense centers under fire, according to a tweet by the civil defense.
A Russian-US ceasefire agreement that was reached on Sept 9 and went into effect on Sept 12 collapsed on Monday with an attack on a humanitarian aid convoy near Aleppo that killed about 20 people.
White Helmets member Ammar Selmo told Alice that he believes the group was “deliberately targeted”, and says he “intercepted pilots’ communications and heard them getting orders to bomb his colleagues”.
The statement gave no details of what the operation may entail – eastern Aleppo had already been the target of intense air strikes on Thursday.
As the diplomats huddled in a NY hotel, Syria’s military command said it would restart operations in the northern city of Aleppo, scene of some of the bitterest fighting in recent months.
The latest cease-fire in Syria lasted six days before the warplanes returned to Aleppo. A member of the Syrian opposition meeting in NY said there was “no indication that the Russians have any interest in a ceasefire”.
“Like any military operation, it starts with preparatory airstrikes and artillery, and then the ground forces work according to the results of the strikes and their impact”, the source said.
The intensified assault on Aleppo came after efforts to revive a partial cease-fire in the conflict stalled in NY, where diplomats from the International Syria Support Group had been meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly annual session.
“Nearly 2 million people in Aleppo are once again with no running water through the public network”.
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More than 400,000 people have died and 11 million been displaced in the five-and-a-half year war, which erupted in 2011 after government troops cracked down brutally on initially peaceful anti-Assad protests.
