BEIRUT, Lebanon — Bombs from airstrikes hit three hospitals on Wednesday in the rebel-held side of Aleppo, Syria, including a pediatrics center supported by the United Nations, in what aid providers and opposition activists called a new atrocity in the fighting that has ravaged the city.
The Middle East regional office of Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Fund, said in a statement that the attacks happened within a space of three hours on al-Bayan and al-Hakeem hospitals and the Abdulhadi Fares clinic.
Unicef provided no details on casualties, damage or who was responsible, but it said the attack was the second on al-Hakeem hospital, which it helps operate.
Others said that at least 10 civilians were killed in the bombings, including children, and that many others were wounded. Activist groups blamed Syrian military forces. Insurgents have no aircraft, which are used to conduct such bombings.
“This devastating pattern of warfare in Syria seems to have no checks and balances,” the Unicef regional director, Dr. Peter Salama, said in astatement posted on Twitter. “Surely this should shake the moral compass of the world. How long will we allow the children of Syria to suffer like this?”
Aleppo, once Syria’s commercial center, has been a battleground for much of the war that began more than five years ago between the forces of President Bashar al-Assad and an array of opposition groups.
The hospital attacks came a day after Mr. Assad promised to take back “every inch” of territory from his enemies in a defiant televised speech that partly reflected his emboldened position since receiving military help from Russia, his most important ally.
Hospitals and medical workers have been repeatedly attacked in the conflict, crippling Syria’s public health system in what medical workers and human rights advocates have assailed as a new low in the savagery of war.
Last month, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolutionreminding combatants that hospitals must be treated as sanctuaries, not targets, and that violators must be held accountable.
Only seven hospitals are still functioning in the rebel-held neighborhoods of Aleppo, home to about 350,000 people, according to the advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights.
An opposition activist video posted on YouTube, which was corroborated by others in Aleppo reached via internet chat services, showed enormous fires and billowing black smoke in the aftermath of the bombings on Wednesday.
“It was a mess, it was so dusty, I saw fire, body parts,” Yehya al-Rijo, an activist who rushed to al-Bayan hospital after the bombings, said in an internet chat exchange. He said the bottom floor was destroyed.
“I didn’t know what to do — should I take my camera and shoot or should I rescue the wounded? I took the second choice.”
Rebel-held neighborhoods of Aleppo have been pummeled in dozens of bomb attacks in recent weeks, despite a “cessation of hostilities” agreement negotiated by the 17-nation International Syria Support Group, a collaboration led by Russia and the United States aimed at halting the war. Rebels have responded by launching mortar shells and handmade rockets on government-held neighborhoods in the city.
