Heartbreaking video shows mourning for dead children after Syrian airstrikes unleash 'hell on earth'

• A heartbreaking video shows the aftermath of Syrian airstrikes on a Damascus suburb, leaving a distraught man holding the body of a lifeless child. 
• Syria and its Russian backers have intensified airstrikes on what they call terrorists, but mounting evidence shows their targets are civilians and hospitals. 
• In recent days, at least 250 have been reported dead in the airstrikes, and the international community has run out of words to describe the suffering. 

A heartbreaking video, purporting to show a father holding and mourning a dead child, has surfaced after another wave of airstrikes from Syria's government and its Russian backers drew international condemnation.

In the video, a man picks up a child's body off the back of a flatbed truck, where six other small bodies lie. The man and the observers weep as he appears to say his final goodbye. 

Children in eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, have had their lives ravaged by years of civil war which has recently and sharply turned its focus to their town. 

Over just a few days, at least 290 have been reported dead in what the UN described as "hell on earth." Hospitals are among the locations reported as hit. Often in Syria, after years of Russian and Syrian government strikes targeting hospitals, medical care is administered underground. 

Russia and Syria maintain they bomb only terrorist targets, but outside assessments routinely prove their targets are often civilian, and allege use of chemical weapons in the attacks.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel joined a growing chorus of world leaders on Thursday in saying the targets were not terrorists, and were instead ordinary Syrian citizens being massacred. 

A Syrian opposition figure called the campaign to crush resistance to Syrian President Bashar Assad's government a new "holocaust." The UN's children's fund issued a statement on the bombing, saying there were"no words will do justice to the children killed, their mothers, their fathers, and their loved ones."

In the video below, the suffering of one of those Syrians has been captured in heart-wrenching detail: