The flashpoint Syrian city of Hama endured a fifth day under military siege with reports of people “slaughtered like sheep” in the streets and families burying their dead in home gardens or roadsides rather than risk a trip to a cemetery.

Food supplies grew short and residents shared bread, while phones, electricity and internet were cut off or severely hampered.

There was no official count of the dead. One resident said around 250 people had been killed during last week. And a rights group that tracks death tallies reported up to 30 people were killed in Hama on Wednesday alone.

The tolls could not be verified because of the difficulty of reaching residents and hospital officials in the besieged city, where journalists are barred as they are throughout Syria.

One resident said he had seen gunmen in plain clothes randomly shooting people in the streets.

“People are being slaughtered like sheep while walking in the street,” said the man, who spoke to The Associated Press by phone. “I saw with my own eyes one young boy who was carrying vegetables on a motorcycle being run over by a tank.”

The assault on Hama, a centre of the five-month-old uprising against President Bashar Assad’s iron rule, is among the most ferocious in the government’s efforts to crush the rebellion – and a sign of the Syrian leader’s defiance of growing international condemnation.

The Local Coordination Committee, which tracks the crackdown, said that the city was suffering a severe shortage of food and medical supplies and that the mili-tary was stopping any aid deliveries.

One Hama resident reached on his mobile phone said people were rationing food to get by during the holy month of Ramadan, when many Muslims fast from dawn to dusk and then eat large, festive meals after sundown.

He said the army and pro-government gunmen known as shabiha were shooting randomly at people and keeping food supplies from entering the city.

People have resorted to burying their loved ones in home gardens or roadside pits “because we fear that if we go to the cemetery, we will end up buried along with them,” the resident said. The Local Coordination Committee said many of the dead were also being buried in public parks.

Activists have expressed concern about worsening humanitarian conditions in Hama, saying medi-cal supplies and bread were scarce even before the latest siege.

“There are military operations under way and we warn of grave human rights violations there in view of the siege,” said Abdul-Karim Rihawi, the Damascus-based chief of the Syrian Human Rights League.

Rami Abdul-Rahman, who heads the London-based Observatory for Human Rights, said about 1,000 families had fled Hama in the past two days, most to the villages of Mashtal Hilu to the west and al-Salamieh to the east.