In Syria’s battered Aleppo, death toll rises as international outrage mounts
The battered Syrian city of Aleppo faced another wave of airstrikes and shelling Friday, activists said, killing worshipers at a mosque and damaging a clinic after an earlier air blitz left dozens dead, including patients and staff at a main hospital.
The attacks — apparently carried out by both sides — further eroded efforts to rebuild a cease-fire and halt what a United Nations envoy described as a “monstrous disregard for civilian lives” by all factions in the conflict.
More than 200 people have been killed in the past week in Aleppo by airstrikes and rebel barrages on regime-held neighborhoods, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group based in Britain.
Doctors Without Borders said the death toll in an airstrike on al-Quds hospital in Aleppo on Wednesday had risen to 50, including six medical staff members and one of the area’s last pediatricians. The hospital was supported by both Doctors Without Borders and the International Committee of the Red Cross, which also condemned the strike.
“The sky is falling in Aleppo,” Muskilda Zancada, head of the Doctors Without Borders mission in Syria, said in a statement Friday. “The city, consistently at the front lines of this brutal war, is now in danger of coming under a full offensive. No corner is being spared.”
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