Dozens of intensive care patients are buried under rubble after an attack on another IRC-supported hospital in Syria, which has also injured several medical staff.

The facility in Eastern Aleppo is one of two hospitals confirmed to have been targeted overnight. The attacks come after days of intensified shelling in and around Aleppo following the collapse of the US- Russia brokered ceasefire on the 19th September.  

As the UN Security Council meets in New York today to discuss the protection of health care in conflict, we urge permanent members, especially the United States and Russia, to immediately reinstate the cessation of hostilities. The violence must stop and aid deliveries into Eastern Aleppo and other areas under siege must be accelerated.

The international community cannot continue to sit back and watch the norms of conflict erode.

Those responsible for these blatant violations of warfare must be held to account. We urge the UN Security Council to urgently establish a monitoring and investigation mechanism, with the strong mandate to identify the perpetrators of attacks on medical facilities, aid convoys, and other civil civilian infrastructures and to investigate and prosecute them.

Witnesses say in the aftermath of the attack, doctors and paramedics were standing paralyzed in front of the dead and injured because they could do nothing for them. They were not even able to move them to another hospital because the only ambulance was also destroyed.

Continued attacks on medical facilities are a gross betrayal of Syrian civilians and a breach of International Humanitarian Law, yet the sad fact is that health facilities remain some of the most dangerous places to be in or near throughout Syria.

And while hospitals are close at breaking point with an estimated 35 doctors left in in the city, there is also mounting concern over peoples’ most basic of needs, such as water and food. With supplies running low, local organisations are now operating public kitchens, rather than distributing food to families, in order conserve their supplies and feed the community.

Mark Schnellbaecher, Director of the IRC’s Syria Regional Response