WARNING: The video below contains graphic content.

SYRIAN ACTIVISTS HAVE released shocking footage of a small boy sitting in the back of an ambulance after being rescued from the rubble of a building.

The images, released online by the Aleppo Media Center, show the boy being carried from the building which was destroyed in an air strike in the city.

In the video he is placed on a chair in the ambulance, his face stunned and bloodied and covered in dust. As the camera zooms in on him, he puts his hand to the wound on his head, looks at it and wipes some blood on the seat.

A doctor in Aleppo identified the boy as five-year-old Omran Daqneesh. Osama Abu al-Ezz confirmed he was brought to the hospital known as “M10″ last night following an airstrike on the rebel-held neighbourhood of Qaterji with head wounds, but no brain injury, and was later discharged.

Rescue workers and journalists arrived at Qaterji shortly after the strike and began pulling victims from the rubble.

Rescued from the rubble

“We were passing them from one balcony to the other,” said photojournalist Mahmoud Raslan, who took the footage. He said he had passed along three lifeless bodies before receiving the wounded boy.

A doctor at M10 later reported eight dead, among them five children.

The strike occurred during the sunset call to prayer, around 7.20pm, said Raslan, a correspondent for Al Jazeera Mubashir.

Omran was rescued along with his three siblings, ages one, six, and 11, and his mother and father from the rubble of their partially destroyed apartment building, according to Raslan. None sustained major injuries, but the building collapsed shortly after the family was rescued.

“We sent the younger children immediately to the ambulance, but the 11-year-old girl waited for her mother to be rescued. Her ankle was pinned beneath the rubble,” Raslan said.

Code names

Doctors in Aleppo use code names for hospitals, which they say have been systematically targeted by government airstrikes. Abu al-Ezz said they do that “because we are afraid security forces will infiltrate their medical network and target ambulances as they transfer patients from one hospital to another.”

Activists living in opposition areas rely on informers in the government-controlled Latakia province to warn residents of impending airstrikes. On Wednesday evening, an informant in Latakia informed activist networks that a jet had taken off from the Russian air base at Hmeimim.

“We expected the plane to arrive in Aleppo airspace in two minutes, and sure enough it did,” said Raslan. “It struck twice.”

No one was injured in the first strike, said Raslan. The second one turned Omran’s life upside down.

- With reporting by Michelle Hennessy.

Read: At least four dead in suspected chlorine gas attack in Aleppo>

Read: ‘Catastrophic’: Up to 2m people without running water for four days in Aleppo>