Toll in attack on Kyiv children's hospital reaches 42

Kyiv: Rescuers searched the rubble at a children's hospital on Tuesday for more dead and wounded, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, a day after Russian missiles slammed into the facility and cities across the country in a massive daytime barrage. The death toll from the strikes rose to 42, officials said.

Zelenskyy said on the social platform X that 64 people were hospitalised in the capital, as well as 28 in Kryvyi Rih and six in Dnipro - both cities in central Ukraine.

It was Russia's heaviest bombardment of Kyiv in almost four months and one of the deadliest of the war, hitting seven of the city's 10 districts. The strike on the Okhmatdyt children's hospital, which interrupted open-heart surgery and forced young cancer patients to take their treatments outdoors, drew an international outcry.

The 10-story hospital, Ukraine's largest medical facility for children, was caring for some 670 patients at the time of the attack, Okhmatdyt's Director General, Volodymyr Zhovnir, said Tuesday. The missile hit a two-story wing of the hospital. "The building where we conducted dialysis for children with kidney failure or acute intoxication is ruined entirely," he told reporters, estimating the overall damage to the hospital at $2.5 million.

Danielle Bell, the head of a UN team tracking human rights violations in Ukraine, said at least two people were killed at the hospital and some 50 people were injured, including seven children. The casualty figure would have been much higher if patients hadn't been taken to a bunker when air raid sirens first sounded, she added.

Zhovnir said one of the two killed at the hospital was a female doctor who took children to the shelter and then went back to check nobody had been left behind

Oleh Holubchenko, a pediatric surgeon at the hospital, was operating on a baby with congenital face defects. Despite the blast of air sirens, he and his team decided to continue with the operation. "We couldn't stop halfway through," he told AP.

When the missile struck, the shock wave flung him across the operating theater. Shrapnel caused him minor injuries and pierced the infant's ventilator. The baby, still with an open wound, had to be transported to another Kyiv hospital where they finished the surgery.

Authorities were working to restore the hospital's power and water supply as Kyiv's administrators declared Tuesday an official day of mourning. Entertainment events were prohibited and flags were lowered.

Russia denied responsibility for the hospital strike, insisting it doesn't attack civilian targets . Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Tuesday repeated that position, pointing to a Russian Defence Ministry statement that blamed a Ukrainian air defenCe missile for partially destroying the hospital. AP