A heavy bombardment of rebel-held east Aleppo entered a second day on Friday, hours after the Syrian military announced a major new offensive against the city that ended all talk of restoring a US-Russian ceasefire and raised questions over whether the it had been a tactical ploy by the Assad regime and its Russian sponsors.

Ammar al Selmo, the head of the civil defence rescue service in east Aleppo, told Reuters a fresh wave of bombing had started at 6am local time after heavy overnight attacks. “What’s happening now is annihilation,” he said.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the offensive appeared “aimed at taking bit by bit the eastern sector of Aleppo and emptying it of its residents.” Its head, Rami Abdel Rahman, said “Syrians are dropping barrel bombs and the Russian planes are launching strikes.”

The volunteer civil defence group known as the White Helmets said the strikes had hit three of its centres and put two out of action.

The White Helmets (@SyriaCivilDef) 3 of the 4 @SyriaCivilDef centers in Aleppo city targeted this morning. 60 air strikes in East Aleppo pic.twitter.com/g5seYilDbY

The Syrian military’s announcement of a new offensive was made on Thursday as the US secretary of state, John Kerry, met his Russian opposite number, Sergey Lavrov, and other foreign ministers on the margins of a United Nations summit in New York, with the ostensible hope of restoring a week-long truce that collapsed on Monday.



The meeting broke up after more than two hours without a clear conclusion. Kerry declared “we cannot continue on the same path any longer” but said he had given Russia another chance to come up with “immediate and significant steps” to stop the violence, including the end of Russian and Syrian government bombing of opposition areas. He said he expected to hear back from Lavrov on Friday, but US officials did not say what Washington would do if Moscow did not comply.



The official Syrian army statement declaring the offensive said: “The high command announces the start of operations in the east of Aleppo and calls for brothers and citizens to stay away from areas where terrorists are operating.”



The statement called for civilians to head to Syrian regime checkpoints “to be escorted to safety”. A military source told AFP the bombardment was in preparation for a ground operation which had not yet begun.

The army declaration followed several days of bombing of eastern Aleppo with helicopter-borne barrel bombs and airstrikes from warplanes, which had intensified on Thursday.

In New York Kerry said that the only way to curb the bloodshed was for “the ones who have the air power in this part of the conflict to simply stop using it.”

“Absent a major gesture like this we don’t believe there is a point in making more promises or issuing more plans or announcing something that can’t be enforced or reached,” the secretary of state said. “We can’t go out and say we have an agreement when we don’t. Nor do we tell our partners there is a cessation when there isn’t. The simple reality is that we can’t resolve the crisis if one side is unwilling to do what is necessary to avoid escalation.”

“We have exchanged ideas with the Russians and we plan to consult tomorrow with respect to those ideas,” Kerry said. “If the Russians come back to us with constructive proposals we will listen.”

Lavrov left the meeting without comment, and the French foreign minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault said the Russian’s contribution to the meeting had been “unsatisfactory”.

A senior US official said that news of the Syrian declaration of a new offensive had reached the ministers during the meeting and further undermined hope of restoring the ceasefire. Asked what the US would do if the Russians and Syrian government did not respond with an end to the air campaign, the official said “obviously this is something we are giving a lot of thought to ourselves”.

“Our patience with the current process is far from limitless,” the senior official said. “I don’t think tonight or right now as we are approaching a climactic stage in this is the time where we will go from here, but your question is one is very much on our minds as well.”

Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, said that the Assad regime had used the weeklong, very partial ceasefire to regroup and prepare for further fighting.



“By continuing along this current path, we are sitting in hope that a genocidal dictator in Damascus is going to suddenly behave himself and we are assuming that a country that is willing to subject an UN-administered aid convoy to a brutal two-hour air attack is not playing us for fools,” Lister said.

“I’m sorry to say, that the US has lost great deal of credibility through its policy approach to Syria. Prioritising diplomacy above all else is a brave and laudable foundation, but when it’s consistently failed to produce anything good for five years in a row, perhaps it’s time to consider new and more assertive measures?”

Since Monday, the Syrian air force has stepped up its bombing of rebel-held areas, and both Russia and Syria have been implicated in the attack on the relief convoy, which the UN has deemed a potential war crime.

On Thursday, the Syrian American Medical Society, which operates and supports several hospitals in the country, said one of its facilities in Aleppo had been targeted overnight with cluster munitions. The UN said a clinic had been destroyed in Khan Tuman district, killing medical staff and with civilians still reportedly trapped under the rubble.

The Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, denied his government was responsible for the repeated bombing of hospitals. “We don’t attack any hospitals,” he told the Associated Press. “This is how we can help the terrorists, if we attack hospitals, schools, and things like this.”

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Assad also rejected criticism of his forces’ use of barrel bombs, improvised crates of high explosives most often dropped on urban areas from helicopters. He said the focus on such weapons was because “in the media, ‘when it bleeds, it leads’”.

“A bomb is a bomb, what’s the difference between different kinds of bombs? All bombs are to kill, but it’s about how to use it,” he said. “When you use an armament, you use it to defend the civilians. You kill terrorists in order to defend civilians.”

Fresh details of the horror from a night of intense bombardment emerged on Thursday, including the death of a family of seven in Aleppo’s al-Kallaseh neighbourhood on Wednesday night. The dead included a 14-year-old boy, Ayham, and two infants aged five and nine months, named Laren and Hana’a.



Another family survived for hours under the rubble of their home before being rescued by the father.

“The planes have not left the city’s skies and the bombing is continuous and indiscriminate,” said one activist in eastern Aleppo. Heavy clashes gripped the city’s outskirts after airstrikes triggered major fires, with local activists blaming incendiary bombs.



“It’s so close to my house and I can see the fire,” said one resident in a voice message sent two hours after midnight. “There is fire in the sky.”