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The ICRC has confirmed on its Twitter account that its office in Donetsk has been shelled and a humanitarian worker died in the attack.
ICRC spokesman Ewan Watson confirmed that the worker was a Swiss national.
"One of our colleagues, a Swiss national, was killed in Donetsk, Ukraine, when a shell hit close to our office. We're deeply distressed by this loss," Watson told Reuters.
"A Red Cross representative, Laurent Etienne, a citizen of Switzerland, born 1976, has been killed," Eduard Basurin, head of the political department of the Defense Ministry of the Donetsk People's Republic, told TASS news agency.
Etienne was deputy head of the Red Cross mission in Donetsk, according to an Interfax correspondent.
The death of the humanitarian worker is very concerning, a spokesperson for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine told RIA Novosti.
He expressed condolences, adding that the OSCE will investigate the incident and prepare a report by Friday.
Several blasts were heard in the center of Donetsk as it was heavily shelled, RT Arabic correspondent Anna Knishenko reported from the eastern Ukrainian city.
RT English correspondent Maria Finoshina also reported that a residential area was shelled and that among the hit areas were dormitories for displaced people from Eastern Ukraine and returned POWs.
The City Council confirmed the shelling on its website, adding that emergency services were deployed to the site.
"We can confirm that a mortar hit a nine-storey block of flats in Universitetskaya Street," the self-proclaimed republic's press service told TASS news agency, adding that casualties had been reported.
According to a RIA Novosti correspondent, the shelling was carried out by the self-propelled multiple rocket launcher system BM-27 Uragan. Witnesses said that a hospital and a shopping center were hit by mortar fire.
Public transport operations have been suspended for an uncertain period of time, the City Council statement said.
Earlier on Thursday, fierce fighting was ongoing in and around Donetsk airport, while plumes of black smoke were rising from the area of the building.
On Wednesday, three people died at a school on the first day of classes in the country. Six others were killed at a bus stop as Donetsk came under fire - reportedly from Ukrainian army positions.
Thirty more people were injured in the attacks, which were described by the Russian Foreign Ministry as "blatant and intolerable."
The attacks come despite a ceasefire agreement between Kiev authorities and eastern militia forces, which was signed on September 5 in Minsk.
Comment: Kiev has been massacring civilians for months. Every step of the way, Kiev seems to have been following the model set by the IDF: bombing civilians, calling them terrorists, killing women and children. They've even taken a page out of U.S.-created ISIS, torture, execution, beheading. But ask your average brainwashed westerner and they'll tell you the Ukrainian army are the good guys, and evil Putin is stirring up rebellion in the east. Now, like the IDF, Kiev is apparently targeting humanitarian institutions. We'll just have to see if the death of a western European humanitarian worker in Ukraine is enough to spark the outrage of the average westerner. Something tells us it will not, and the mindless killing will continue.