It is close to a frontline where clashes and heavy bombardment have occurred in recent days. The cave hospital opened north of Hama in late 2015 after aid groups and other donors paid about half a million dollars to build and equip it. Since the ceasefire collapsed, fierce battles have been waged in the northern city of Aleppo, where pro-government forces are trying to capture the last major urban area under rebel control, and near Hama, where rebels have launched an advance of their own that threatens to approach the important government-held city. Photos showed long cracks around the rocky, dome-shaped ceiling, and hospital rooms covered in the rubble of collapsing walls. Staff reported the blast caused “something like an earthquake”, he said. Since launching their latest intensified air campaign, the Russian and Syrian forces have been using much more powerful “bunker-buster” bombs, which residents of opposition-held areas say have the force to bring down entire buildings.Īt least one of the bombs dropped on the cave hospital appeared to be a bunker buster because of the force of the blast, said Ahmad al-Dbis, of the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations (UOSSM), a coalition of international aid agencies which funds hospitals in Syria including this one.
The first attack caused a huge blast at the front entrance of the hospital before another big bomb fell nearby, causing staff to panic, Darwish said. Moscow and Damascus say they target only militants and deny that they have hit hospitals, although several have been hit during the latest bombing campaign, which began after a ceasefire collapsed in September.Īccording to Darwish, two waves of strikes hit the hospital. Western countries including the United States say Syria’s government and its Russian allies are guilty of war crimes for deliberately targeting civilians, aid deliveries and hospitals during a three week escalation of the civil war.
“The mountainous rock, praise God, did not collapse at all,” hospital head Abdallah Darwish told Reuters from the area. To some degree it worked: when Russian or Syrian government warplanes bombed it in two waves of air strikes on Sunday, nobody inside the cave was seriously hurt.īut massive bombs wrecked the emergency ward near the entrance, caved in interior ceilings, crumbled cement walls and destroyed generators, water tanks and medical equipment, knocking the underground hospital out of service. Opposition groups built the “central cave hospital” north of Hama to withstand bombardment, tunneling into a mountain in northwestern Syria for more than a year to bury it below 17 meters of rock. The damaged interior of an underground hospital that was hit by an airstrike is pictured in the rebel held town of Kafr Zita, Hama countryside, Syria October 3, 2016.
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