A least 23 people were killed and 35 others were injured when three Russian warplanes launched 17 airstrikes on opposition-controlled northwestern Idlib city late Monday, a Syrian civil defense official said.
Abdurrazak Jubeiro, a civil defense official in Idlib, told Anadolu Agency that the airstrikes hit several targets in the city, including the al-Wataniand Ibn Sina hospital as well as a mosque.
The casualties included a number of women and children while civil defense rescue teams rushed to dig up collapsed homes to find the dead and the injured, Jubeiro said.
He added that two hospitals in total were hit in the strikes, including the Ibn Sina hospital, which was severely damaged and would not be able to provide crucial medical services anymore.
Reuters reported, heavy Russian air strikes air in Syria’s rebel-held city of Idlib on Monday evening killed and injured more than 150 people, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
At least seven strikes hit the western Syrian city. More than 23 people were killed. Seven children were among the dead in the heaviest bombardment since a cessation of hostilities was agreed in February. Observatory Director Rami Abdulrahman said,The toll was likely to rise, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Some struck the area where the national hospital is located, the war monitor said.
The Observatory said the air strikes targeted a number of positions in the city, one of them next to a hospital. Idlib is a stronghold of rebel groups.
According to Associated Press, A wave of air strikes on a rebel-held stronghold in northwest Syria Monday night caused mass casualties and sparked fresh clashes. The flare up in violence came a day after the opposition’s chief negotiator resigned in frustration over the stalled Geneva peace talks with the government of Bashar Assad.

 The Local Coordination Committees, an activist network, said 10 people were killed when the city’s National Hospital was hit, but had no details about casualties elsewhere in the city.
The opposition Civil Defense, which carries out rescue operations, gave a much higher casualty figure, saying dozens were killed and hundreds wounded in the air strikes in which several hospitals were damaged. The group said it had deployed its entire Idlib corps to take part in rescue operations.
A day earlier, the opposition’s chief negotiator in the Geneva peace talks with the government announced he had resigned from his post, saying the international community was not “serious” about reaching a solution to the country’s five-year civil war.
Mohammed Alloush, in a statement released late Sunday, said that Syrian government forces continue attacking the opposition and besieging rebel-held areas, despite the three rounds of negotiations in Geneva.
The “proximity” talks that began in January have failed to make any progress amid contrary demands by the opposition team and the government delegation.
The Syrian opposition has insisted that political transition should come first while the government says fighting terrorism should be the priority. The last round was held in April and no date has been set for the next talks.
As evidence of the talks’ failure, Alloush said the U.N. has not been able to set up a transitional governing body for Syria or find a political solution to the crisis.
The opposition has been insisting that Bashar Assad and top official in his government have no role in Syria’s future — or even during the transitional period.
Alloush said he handed in his resignation to the opposition’s High Negotiations Committee and described his move as a “protest against the international community,” which he hoped would come to realize “the importance of the Syrian blood that is being shed by the (Damascus) regime and its allies.”
Meanwhile, opposition activists reported intense government airstrikes in the northern province of Aleppo on Monday.
The province has witnesses some of the worst violence over the past months and has also seen clashes lately between rebels and members of the extremist Islamic State group, which captured several villages last week before losing two of them again on Sunday.
More than 160,000 civilians have been trapped by the fighting between IS and Syrian rebels and the aid group Doctors Without Borders last week evacuated one of the few remaining hospitals from the Aleppo area.
Source: Anadolu Agency, Reuters, Associated Press, 31 may 2016