NGOs and Aid agencies say up to a quarter of a million people are trapped in Aleppo and that the aid lifeline that delivers supplies to them and
ADVERTISEMENTNGOs and Aid agencies say up to a quarter of a million people are trapped in Aleppo and that the aid lifeline that delivers supplies to them and millions of other Syrians risks being broken.
The UN in Geneva said on Thursday that the stakes are incredibly high over the next few days.
“So many civilian lives are at stake”, said Jan Egeland, the Chairman of the UN Humanitarian Task Force. “So many humanitarian health workers and relief workers are being bombed, killed, maimed at the moment, that the whole lifeline to millions of people is now also at stake.”
In Washington US State Department Spokesman John Kirby described the attack on the hospital in Aleppo as “reprehensible” and called on the Syrian regime to end what it called the senseless attacks:
“The details and the circumstances are still coming in but it sure bears all the hallmarks of the kind of strikes that the regime has done in the past on treatment facilities and, frankly, on first responders.”
Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders, said the organisation is appalled at the bombing of the hospital, claiming it’s the seventh attack on MSF supported facilities this year.
“The best resource that people had to go to, that women had to go to to give birth, that sick children could go to, doesn’t exist any more”, said
Sam Taylor, the group’s Syria communications coordinator. “There are other medical structures there but this was the referral point for the whole of Aleppo, for the 250,000 people that are trapped – they have to find alternatives. Those alternatives will not be as good as what was destroyed last night.”
Medecins Sans Frontieres said at least 14 patients and three doctors were killed in the air strike on al-Quds hospital.
Among them was one of the city’s last remaining paediatricians.