UN says 2 million people in Aleppo are without running water

Hanaa Singer, UNICEF representative in Syria, said intense attacks damaged the Bab al-Nairab station that supplies some 250,000 people in rebel-held eastern parts of the contested city with water.

Ms Singer said the Suleiman al-Halabi pumping station, also located in the rebel-held east, was then switched off in retaliation – cutting water to 1.5 million people in government-held western parts of the city.

She warned: “Depriving children of water puts them at risk of catastrophic outbreaks of water-borne diseases”.

The new government push came as the United Nations said that almost 2 million people in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and onetime commercial center, are without running water following an escalation in fighting over the past few days.

Fighting in Aleppo intensified recently after a one-week U.S. -Russia-brokered cease-fire collapsed.

Syrian troops captured a rebel-held area on the edge of Aleppo on Saturday, tightening their siege on opposition-held neighborhoods in the northern city after what residents described as the heaviest air bombardment of the 5 ½-year civil war.

The Syrian army said in a statement that the rebels violated the week-long truce over 300 times, adding that the USA -led coalition struck positions of the Syrian army during the truce in Deir al-Zour, killing 90 soldiers, which was deemed by Russian Federation as the biggest violation to the truce.

The capture of the Handarat camp a few miles north of Aleppo marked the first major ground advance of the offensive, which the government announced on Thursday.

Meanwhile, the rebels’ Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, previously known as Nusra Front before breaking ties with al-Qaida, said that the Syrian army and the Palestinian Liwa al-Quds succeeded to take the camp under heavy airstrikes from the Russian air force. Video of the blast sites show huge craters several meters wide and deep. It is the last major urban area held by the opposition, and the rebels’ defeat there would mark a major turning point in the conflict, which has killed more than 300,000 people and driven half the country’s population from their homes.

Aleppo was once Syria’s commercial and industrial hub but has been ravaged by fighting and roughly divided between government control in the west and rebel control in the east since mid-2012.

He added five vehicles belonging to the group were destroyed, including an ambulance. “Our teams are responding but are not enough to cover this amount of catastrophe”.

A pro-government Iraqi militia commander in the Aleppo area told Reuters the aim was to capture all of Aleppo within a week.

In its late-night announcement on Thursday, the Syrian military announced “the start of its operations in the eastern districts of Aleppo”.

Asked about the weapons being used, the military source said the army was using precise weapons “suitable for the nature of the targets being struck, according to the type of fortifications”, such as tunnels and bunkers, and “specifically command centres”.

A senior official in an Aleppo-based rebel faction, the Levant Front, told Reuters the weapons appeared created to bring down entire buildings.

“Most of the victims are under the rubble because more than half the civil defence has been forced out of service”, he said. Rescue workers said Friday’s death toll was over 100.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported at least 30 air strikes had targeted different areas of Aleppo during the early morning of September 23 and said at least 27 civilians had been killed with dozens of others wounded and others still lying under rubble.

“The raids are intense and continuous”, Observatory Director Rami Abdulrahman told Reuters.

“I woke up to a powerful quake though I was in a place far away from where the missile landed”, said a rebel commander in a voice recording sent to Reuters.

Kerry said he had made “a little progress” in talks on Friday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who cited no progress and accused the United States of failing to honour the latest ceasefire deal.