More Than 200 Civilians Killed in Last Week of Aleppo Violence

Syria Strikes Aleppo Civilians
A woman, who survived an airstrike, sits amid the damage in the rebel-held area of Old Aleppo, Syria, April 28, 2016. It came in a week of intense loss of life in the Syrian city. Reuters/Abdalrhman Ismail

More than 200 civilians have been killed in air strikes and shelling on government-held and rebel-held areas in the last seven days of fighting in the embattled Syrian city of Aleppo, a monitoring group said on Friday.

As a ceasefire agreed between the opposing sides in the Syrian conflict continues to collapse, air strikes killed at least 123 civilians, including 18 children, in rebel-held areas in the city in the last week.

In the same period, shelling from rebels targeting government-held areas killed at least 71 civilians, including 13 children, according to the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group that uses a range of sources on the ground to assess the Syrian conflict.

Government shelling killed a further eight civilians, including three children, in areas it does not control in the city.

The death toll continued to rise as the international community put out a call for both parties to end hostilities and return to the negotiating table.

The United Nations (UN) warned on Thursday that the situation in the northern Syrian city is becoming "catastrophic" as fighting intensifies and the U.N. envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said that the ceasefire between the two sides was now "barely alive."

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday denounced a deadly strike on a pediatric hospital, run by the charity Doctors Without Borders, in a rebel-held area of Aleppo that left at least 50 people dead, including six hospital staff—two doctors, two nurses, one guard and a maintenance worker.

"We are outraged by yesterday's airstrikes in Aleppo on the al Quds hospital supported by both Doctors Without Borders and the International Committee of the Red Cross, which killed dozens of people, including children, patients and medical personnel," he said in a statement.

"It appears to have been a deliberate strike on a known medical facility and follows the Assad regime's appalling record of striking such facilities and first responders," he continued. "These strikes have killed hundreds of innocent Syrians."

Elsewhere on Thursday, 150 U.S. troops arrived in the northern Syrian town of Rmeilan, controlled by Syrian-Kurdish forces, in Hasakah Province. The Syrian regime called it an "illegitimate intervention."

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