BEIRUT — The UN's children's agency on Thursday raised the death toll from an attack the previous day on a school in Syria's rebel-held Idlib province to 28 — 22 children and six teachers — and suggested it may have been the deadliest attack on a school in the country's civil war.
The airstrikes struck the village of Hass around midday Wednesday, hitting a residential compound that houses a school complex. The Syrian Civil Defense first responder team and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Thursday that the airstrikes killed at least 35 people, mostly children.
The Observatory said 15 students were killed, as well as four teachers and three other women. It was not immediately possible to reconcile the separate figures, but divergent death tolls are not uncommon in a conflict-torn Syria that has been largely inaccessible to international media for over two years.
UNICEF and the Syrian Civil Defense said the death toll is likely to rise as rescue efforts continue. They said that two schools in the area were hit with 11 airstrikes around midday.
UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake called the airstrikes an "outrage," adding that if found to be deliberate the attacks would be considered a war crime.
"This latest atrocity may be the deadliest attack on a school since the war began," Lake said in a statement. "When will the world's revulsion at such barbarity be matched by insistence that this must stop?"
Idlib is the main Syrian opposition stronghold, though radical militant groups also have a large presence there. It has regularly been hit by Syrian and Russian warplanes as well as the U.S.-led coalition targeting Islamic State militants. An activist at the scene said as many as 10 airstrikes were believed to have hit Hass on Wednesday.
Juliette Touma, regional UNICEF chief of communication, said Wednesday's attack was the deadliest attack on a school in 2016, bringing the overall death toll of children killed in such attacks in 2016 to 54.
According to Touma, 591 children were killed in 2015 in Syria.
Read Friday's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full details.