Four hospitals hit by air raids in Syria’s Aleppo

Four makeshift hospitals and a local blood bank in Syria’s battered Aleppo city have been hit by air raids in the past 24 hours, a group of doctors said Sunday.

The bombardment killed a two-day-old baby in the children’s hospital in a besieged eastern neighbourhood of Aleppo, said the Independent Doctor’s Association, a group of Syrian doctors that supports clinics in the city.

The infant’s oxygen supply was cut after a strike on the hospital at 1:00 am (2300 GMT), the second strike on the hospital in about nine hours, according to the IDA.

“The doctors could only yell for their colleagues to take cover and shield the babies,” the group said in a statement.

The IDA said the four hospitals that were hit -- the children’s hospital, Al-Bayan, Al-Zahraa, and Al-Daqaq -- would all be going out of service “as a result of the escalating series of aerial attacks taking place against health facilities in Aleppo by Syrian and Russian warplanes.”

The World Health Organization said Syria was the most dangerous place for health care workers to operate last year, with 135 attacks on health facilities and workers in 2015.

In recent months, several hospitals have been damaged and medical staff killed in the densely populated eastern neighborhoods of Aleppo city.

A hospital in the eastern Maadi neighborhood was hit just eight days ago, wounding some of the staff and patients inside.

More than 280,000 people have been killed since Syria’s conflict erupted in 2011, and millions have been forced to flee.