Syria war: Aleppo rebel attack on school kills seven children

The attacks have been described as “the heaviest bombardment” seen during the five year Syrian War, with one resident describing conditions in the eastern part of the city as “a Holocaust”.

Syrian regime forces pounded eastern Aleppo with airstrikes for a sixth straight day Sunday, bringing the death toll to nearly 300 in the most intense bombing since the war began five years ago, rescuers say. Syrian regime officials denied the use of chlorine gas, which would go against the worldwide Chemical Weapons Convention prohibiting its use.

Earlier Sunday, at least eight children were killed when rockets struck a school in Aleppo’s government-run western quarters, the Observatory said.

Muallem said he had rejected a proposal for a deal that would recognise an autonomous rebel administration in east Aleppo.

Without a functional hospital inside the besieged city, the World Health Organization (WHO) says more than 250,000 people are in need of trauma care and major surgeries. The message is simple and I don’t know how to say it any louder: “stop bombing hospitals”.

Government forces have pounded opposition districts with air strikes, barrel bombs and artillery fire since Tuesday last week, killing more than 100 people in recent days according to the observatory’s count.

“The Turkish state is a terrorist state that is attacking positions of the military council that is fighting Daesh [Isis]”, he said, as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan continues to resist a proposed no-fly zone in the region. Eastern Aleppo is surrounded by pro-government forces and access to the area has been cut. They are backed by Turkish ground forces operating inside Syria.

A Syrian teen pushes his bicycle past a burning house on Saturday following a reported air strike on Aleppo’s rebel-held neighbourhood of Bab al-Nayrab.. That brought to 115 the number of civilians killed, including 18 children, since the bombardment of east Aleppo resumed, it said.

“This is completely rejected”, Foreign Minister Walid Muallem said of the proposal in televised comments in Damascus, after meeting with United Nations special envoy Staffan de Mistura.

Muallem also called on the US President-elect Donald Trump to put an end to Washington’s support for militant groups inside Syria, and restrain countries in the Middle East region that sponsor them militarily and financially. Eastern Aleppo is the Syrian opposition’s largest stronghold and the government has tried to retake it by tightening the siege and dropping bombs on the area. Local medics said they had suffocated to death because the bomb was laced with chlorine gas. It showed the bodies of four children stretched out on a floor, their lips blue and dark marks around their open eyes. Another was the manager of a hospital and said doctors had confirmed the cause of their death as gas poisoning. “In the last few hours, two remaining hospitals have come under intense shelling by the regime”, Al Jazeera’s Osama Bin Javaid said.

Aleppo, once Syria’s commercial hub, has been divided into a government-controlled west and an opposition-held east since fighting broke out for control of the city in mid-2013.

He warned the that military’s unrestrained approach would drive more moderate rebels into the ranks of the Islamic State group.