States backing Syria’s peace process should do everything they can to stop unlawful attacks on targets such as hospitals and other civilian sites, UN war crimes investigators said in a statement on Wednesday.
Recent attacks on civilian areas took different forms including airstrikes, shelling and rocket fire, the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria said in a statement.
“Failure to respect the laws of war must have consequences for the perpetrators,” the commission’s chairman, Paulo Pinheiro, said. “Until the culture of impunity is uprooted, civilians will continue to be targeted, victimized and brutally killed,” he added.
International law requires all parties to the conflict to distinguish between lawful and unlawful targets, but that distinction had been ignored and some recent attacks had been war crimes, the statement said.
The statement cited an attack on the Alquds hospital in Aleppo on April 27, other attacks on nearby medical facilities, and airstrikes on markets, bakeries and a water station, as well as an airstrike on a refugee camp in Idlib on May 5th.
Only the Assad regime and its Russian allies have access to aircrafts in Syria.
Regime forces earlier today launched airstrikes on southern rural Aleppo, killing 10 people and wounding dozens more. Activists in the area said that over 75 airstrikes hit southern and western rural Aleppo on Tuesday, while other airstrikes targeted the neighborhoods of Karm Alqatirji and Karm AlJabal in Aleppo city.
Regime forces have not stopped aerial attacks on Aleppo despite agreeing earlier to extend a US-Russian brokered “regime of calm” in the city for an additional three days, starting from 12:00 PM on Monday. (Source: The New Arab)
