BEIRUT — A bakery and two major hospitals were hit in bombardments of rebel-held eastern Aleppo early on Wednesday, residents said, as Syrian government forces pressed their Russian-backed campaign to retake the whole city.
The airstrikes early Wednesday hit the M1 and M10 hospitals, knocking out generators and cutting off water supplies, putting them temporarily out of service.
Mohammed Abu Rajab, head of M10 hospital, the largest of eight hospitals in eastern Aleppo, says two patients died because they could not be kept alive. He says the intensive care unit was severely damaged.
Adham Sahloul, of the Syrian American Medical Society, based in Gaziantep, Turkey, confirmed the strikes and described them as deliberate. He says government forces know the location of both facilities.
The closures leave eastern Aleppo with six functioning hospitals, only three of which are capable of dealing with emergencies.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict, said the bakery in Al-Maadi neighborhood had been hit by artillery shelling, killing at least six people.
Over 250,000 civilians are thought to be besieged in the rebel-held sector of Aleppo, where intensive bombing by government forces and their allies has killed hundreds of people since a ceasefire collapsed last week.
The Aleppo maelstrom prompted Western powers to accuse Russia of committing possible war crimes, charges the Kremlin condemned as “unacceptable.”
In the latest broadside, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also condemned the air campaign.
“The appalling attacks on Aleppo have shaken all of us, and the violence and the attacks we have seen... is morally totally unacceptable and is a blatant violation of international law,” Stoltenberg told a news conference in Bratislava. — Agencies
