Syrian artillery pounded the rebel city of Rastan yesterday, killing seven civilians, monitors said, as the Red Cross delivered aid to refugees who had fled the nearby battered quarter of Baba Amr.
Shells sometimes fell in Baba Amr at a rate of 100 an hour
The aid distribution came as relief agencies waited for a third day for the go-ahead to enter the Homs district of Baba Amr, where hundreds of people are reported to have been killed and even more wounded in an almost month-long blitz.
The shelling of Rastan, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, has involved the killing of seven people, including four children, when a house was hit.
Rebels on February 5 declared Rastan “liberated” from President Bashar al-Assad’s control, but since Homs was overrun by regime forces on Thursday, army deserters have been braced for an onslaught on Rastan and Qusayr, also near Homs.
Rastan, like Homs, is a strategic city on the main road linking Damascus with northern Syria. The Observatory had on Friday reported 12 civilians, including five children, killed when a rocket hit a crowd of protesters in Rastan.
The latest deaths in Rastan raised to at least 11 the number of civilians killed across Syria yesterday, according to the Observatory which also reported a soldier killed in the northwest province of Idlib.
In Aleppo, a 10-year-old boy was killed by a bomb placed outside a school in Bustan al-Basha district, the group said.
Rebels withdrew from Baba Amr in Homs on Thursday in the face of a ground assault by regime forces following a bombardment since early February that the US-based Human Rights Watch said had killed some 700 people.
HRW said shells sometimes fell in Baba Amr at a rate of 100 an hour, and that satellite images showed 640 buildings visibly damaged, but stressed that the real picture could be worse. The Syrian authorities have been condemned by the international community for barring Red Cross convoys from entering Baba Amr to evacuate the wounded and distribute supplies. The International Committee of the Red Cross said it delivered relief supplies yesterday to refugees from Baba Amr in a nearby village.
British photographer Paul Conroy, wounded in a rocket attack in Baba Amr on February 22 that killed two colleagues, said the bombardment amounted to a “mediaeval siege and slaughter,” and denounced the government as “murderers.”
The bodies of American journalist Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik, killed in the rocket attack, were flown into Paris from Damascus, yesterday.
Israel, meanwhile, offered to send humanitarian aid to civilians via the Red Cross, the foreign ministry said. yesterday.
“The Jewish state cannot stand by without doing a thing while atrocities are taking place in a neighbouring country and people are losing their whole worlds,” Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said in a statement.