Beirut: At least 15 civilians were "summarily executed" by regime forces in a neighbourhood of the central Syrian city of Homs overnight, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Wednesday.
"After regime forces raided the neighbourhood of Shammas, 15 civilians were found summarily executed," Rami Abdul Rahman, head of the Britain-based watchdog told AFP, qualifying the killings a "massacre."
He said a Muslim cleric who had six children was among those killed.
New wave of army raids
Damascus: Syria's army launched a new wave of raids to crush resistance on Wednesday, a day after more than 60 people were killed and a UN convoy came under a bomb attack for the second time in less than a week.
UN monitors stranded in attack
Syrian rebels on Wednesday delivered six UN ceasefire monitors who had been caught up in the attack that killed at least 21 people over to their UN colleagues, a rebel source said.
He said the observers, who had been with rebels in the town since the previous day, departed Khan Shaikhoun in a UN vehicle that came from Damascus to retrieve them.
They had stayed overnight with rebel forces who said it would be unsafe for them to leave alone.
Regime troops fire on refugee camp
Earlier it was reported that Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least four people died in the latest violence, all of them in the south where troops killed three people including a child when they fired on a refugee camp.
The Observatory's Rami Abdul Rahman told AFP that the camp in southern Daraa province houses Palestinian refugees and Syrians displaced from the occupied Golan Heights.
Blasts and heavy gunfire were also reported in the city of Daraa, cradle of a 15-month uprising against the regime of President Bashar Al Assad.
Heavy fire
In the northwest, Khan Shaikhun had come under heavy machinegun fire since the morning, the Observatory added, after reporting regime forces "massacred" 20 people during a funeral procession in the Idlib province town on Tuesday.
During the funeral, a convoy of UN truce observers had come under bomb attack in Khan Shaikhun, damaging three vehicles but causing no casualties, the United Nations said.
The blast occurred as the convoy made its way along a narrow street, according to reports by the Observatory, activists, and the rebel Free Syrian Army.
Video uploaded to YouTube by activists showed a convoy of UN vehicles surrounded by dozens of people before a blast was heard and a puff of smoke went up in front of the leading UN-marked jeep.
It was unclear if there were any casualties, and the vehicle drove away despite damage to its hood, according to the footage, whose authenticity could not be verified.
Convoy under attack
Activists said the UN convoy had come under attack and one car was hit by a shell, prompting the monitors to quickly leave the area. Major Sami al-Kurdi, a spokesman for the Free Syrian Army, told AFP the monitors had arrived during the funeral and that their presence had encouraged more mourners to turn out and join the procession.
"The regime dared to attack the procession, however, and then targeted the vehicles of the UN observers from a regime checkpoint," he said.
It was the second roadside bombing involving the observers' vehicles in less than a week, after a blast wounded six Syrian soldiers escorting a UN convoy in Daraa city on May 9.
The United Nations, which accuses both sides of violating an April 12 ceasefire, reaffirmed its condemnation of any violence against the monitors.
"This mission is there to help the people of Syria, to help ensure that the six-point plan is implemented," spokesman Martin Nesirky said, referring to a peace plan drawn up by UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan.
"Anything that interrupts their work and endangers the lives of UN personnel is something we would condemn."
64 killed Tuesday
The Observatory, which is based in Britain, updated its toll of people killed in Syria on Tuesday to 64, including two rebel fighters and 11 regular army soldiers.
The bloodshed comes despite a truce brokered by Annan as part of a six-point plan aimed at ending violence that has swept Syria since March 2011.
Meanwhile, Annan urged Syria to stop delaying an agreement on allowing UN access to more than one million Syrians in need of assistance, saying the process had been "very slow."
'Extremely concerned'
Annan "remains extremely concerned about the plight of one million Syrians in need of humanitarian assistance," said Nesirky.
Part of Annan's plan includes the deployment in flashpoint areas of about 300 UN military observers, and their number reached more than 200 on Tuesday, said the mission's chief, Major General Robert Mood.
Although the number of casualties has decreased since the observers began trickling into Syria in mid-April, the violence has not stopped. More than 12,000 people, the majority of them civilians, have died since the Syrian uprising began, according to the Observatory, including more than 900 killed since the truce came into effect.
Damascus maintains that foreign-backed "armed terrorist groups" are behind the unrest, trying to undermine the regime and scuttle attempts at political reform.
