Family of 9 Killed in Eastern Ghouta as UN Calls for Ending ‘Hell on Earth’

  • 2/26/2018
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A family of nine was killed in Syrian regime bombardment of the rebel enclave of eastern Ghouta near Damascus overnight, where air strikes and fighting have persisted despite a UN Security Council resolution demanding a 30-day ceasefire. "Eastern Ghouta cannot wait, it is high time to stop this hell on earth," UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. "I expect the resolution to be immediately implemented and sustained," he said. The UN human rights chief, Zeid Raad al-Hussein, also spoke at the Council, echoing calls for a "full implementation" of the truce. Zeid decried "seven years of failure to stop the violence, seven years of unremitting and frightful mass killing" in Syria. The bombardment of eastern Ghouta over the past week has been one of the heaviest of Syrias war, killing at least 522 people in seven days, according to a toll compiled by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based war monitor. It said two bodies had been pulled from the rubble of a home destroyed by an air strike in the Ghouta town of Douma, with seven others from the same family dead underneath. The Security Council, including Russia, approved the resolution demanding the 30-day truce on Saturday. The intensity of the bombardment has diminished since then but has still killed two dozen people, the Observatory said. Health authorities in eastern Ghouta said late on Sunday that several people had suffered symptoms consistent with chlorine gas exposure, killing one child, after an explosion. But Moscow on Monday said reports of the chemical attack were planted "bogus stories."

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