By Michael Igoe

One of them, Dr. Farida — referred to by single a first name in the hearing — described an instance when she was in the midst of performing a cesarean section when a missile struck the fourth floor of the hospital where she was operating in besieged Aleppo, causing the roof to collapse.

“The surgical staff had to flee the room, but the doctors couldn’t, because we were forced to clean debris out of the patient’s abdominal cavity. Thankfully we were able to save her life,” Dr. Farida said.

“A hospital was the most dangerous place in Aleppo,” she said.

A report published Tuesday in the Lancet backs up Dr. Farida’s first-hand observation.

“The weaponisation of health care — a strategy of using people’s need for health care as a weapon against them by violently depriving them of it — has translated into hundreds of health workers killed, hundreds more incarcerated or tortured, and hundreds of health facilities deliberately and systematically attacked,” it reads.