THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Doctors Without Borders is a charity of medical professionals who provide medical treatment in crisis areas to all who need it. And once again it becomes the target of one of the belligerents for reasons never stated but hardly accidental.

Syria’s divided city of Aleppo plunged back into the kind of all-out war not seen in months on Thursday, witnesses and health workers said, as they reeled from government airstrikes that demolished a hospital in the insurgent-held side and from retaliatory mortar assaults by rebels on the government-held side.

At least 27 people, including three children and six staff members, were reported killed in the strike on the hospital, which turned it into a smoking pile of rubble on Wednesday night. At least eight people, mostly civilians, were killed in the mortar attacks on government-controlled areas, said officials at a hospital where casualties were streaming in at midday on Thursday...

The location of Al Quds hospital, the destroyed facility on the rebel side of the city, was well known, and the hospital was assisted by the international charity Doctors Without Borders. “This devastating attack has destroyed a vital hospital in Aleppo, and the main referral center for pediatric care in the area,” the head of the charity’s Syria mission, Muskilda Zancada, said in a statement. “Where is the outrage among those with the power and obligation to stop this carnage?”

Two hospitals in the town of Maarat al-Noaman to the east, including one working with Doctors Without Borders, were hit on the same day earlier this year, each by multiple strikes. Groups such as Physicians for Human Rights have tracked what they call a pattern of deliberate targeting of health services by government forces.

Witnesses contended that the same appeared to be true in the strike on Al Quds hospital, in the neighborhood of Sukkari.

“Those were multiple airstrikes targeting the same area with less than two-minute gaps,” Adnan Hadad, an opposition journalist, said shortly after returning from the scene.

The International Committee of the Red Cross called on all parties to stop indiscriminate attacks and to avoid harming civilians, or Aleppo would face what it called a new humanitarian disaster...

The hospital was hit when it was already full of victims from government shelling, Hadi Abdullah, an opposition journalist, reported in a video from the scene, in which a medical worker said that three of his colleagues had been killed.

Perhaps only hopeless dreamers believe that you can retain some humanity in a war, even a civil war.