(UN News Centre) – Describing the bombardment and crippling siege of Syria’s war-ravaged eastern Aleppo as “crimes of historic proportions” the top United Nations rights official today urged the members of the UN Human Rights Council to “speak with one voice” in an effort to end the bloodshed. “The ancient city of Aleppo, a place of millennial civility and beauty, is today a slaughterhouse – a gruesome locus of pain and fear, where the lifeless bodies of small children are trapped under streets of rubble and pregnant women deliberately bombed,” the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein told a special session of the Geneva-based Human Rights Council today as the 47-member body prepared to take up a draft resolution on the issue.