Attacks on Hospitals Are 'War Crimes,' UN Chief Says

— -- Deliberate attacks on hospitals amount to “war crimes,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said Tuesday just hours after a hospital was targeted in the Syrian city of Aleppo.

“Let us be clear: Intentional and direct attacks on hospitals are war crimes. Denying people access to essential health care is a serious violation of international humanitarian law,” Ban said in a speech to the UN Security Council in New York. “When so-called surgical strikes end up hitting surgical wards, something is deeply wrong.”

The Security Council unanimously adopted a new resolution demanding that all parties in conflicts protect medical staff and facilities.

The resolution follows last Wednesday's bombing of an important hospital in Aleppo that killed more than 50 people including children and the only pediatrician in the area. A maternity hospital was also struck by rocket fire Tuesday, killing at least four people in the city. More than 250 civilians have been killed over the past 12 days.

“Even wars have limits, because wars without limits are wars without ends,” Peter Maurer, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, told the Security Council Tuesday. “Health care personnel and facilities are the outer frontier of these limits.”

More than 730 medical workers have been killed since Syria's civil war began five years ago and there have been more than 360 attacks on some 250 medical facilities in the country, according to Physicians for Human Rights, a nonprofit that uses forensic science, clinical medicine, and public health research to document human rights abuses.