BEIRUT — A Syrian missile strike leveled a block of buildings in an impoverished district of Aleppo on Tuesday, killing at least 33 people, almost half of them children, anti-regime activists said.
Many were trapped under the rubble of destroyed houses and piles of concrete. The death toll was expected to rise.
The apparent ground-to-ground missile attack struck a quiet area that has been held by anti-regime fighters for many months, a reminder of how difficult it is for the opposition to defend territory in the face of the regime’s far superior weaponry.
In the capital Damascus, the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency said two mortar rounds exploded near one of President Bashar Assad’s palaces. No casualties were reported, and it was unclear whether Assad was in the palace. He has two others in the city.
The attack was the first confirmed strike close to a presidential palace and another sign that the civil war is seeping into areas of the capital once considered safe.
“This is a clear message to the regime that nowhere is safe from now on,” said Khaled al-Shami, an activist in Damascus reached via Skype.
“The fact that they had to announce it means they can no longer hide what is happening in Damascus.”
The news service, SANA, said “terrorists” fired the rounds that struck near the southern wall of the Tishreen palace in the capital’s northwestern Muhajireen district. The government refers to anti-government fighters as “terrorists.”
Assad often uses the Tishrin palace to receive dignitaries and as a guesthouse for foreign officials during their visits.
The capital has largely been spared the violence that has left other cities in ruins. For weeks, however, rebels who have established footholds in the suburbs have been pushing closer to the heart of Damascus from the eastern and southern outskirts, clashing with government forces.
Rebels have claimed to fire rockets at presidential palaces in Damascus before, but this strike was the first confirmed by the government.
In the northern city of Aleppo, anti-regime activists said a missile strike flattened a stretch of buildings and killed at least 33 people. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said they included 14 children and five women.
The Jabal Badro district has been under rebel control for months and had been largely quiet until Tuesday’s attack.
The strike was the latest salvo in a fierce and bloody seven-month battle for Syria’s largest city and economic center, a key prize in the civil war.
Rebels have slowly expanded their control over parts of Aleppo since first storming it last summer. The city is now divided between rebel- and regime-controlled zones.
Rebel forces have been trying for weeks to capture Aleppo’s international airport and two military air bases nearby, and the government is sending in reinforcements from areas it still controls farther south and regularly bombing rebel areas from the air.
The activist group Aleppo Media Center said more than 40 were killed and published the names of 21 of them on its Facebook page. There wasno way to reconcile the differing tolls.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Aleppo Media Center said the strike appeared to be from a ground-to-ground missile. The Syrian government did not comment.
Activist Mohammed al-Khatib of the Aleppo Media Center said via Skype that the death toll could rise as residents search for more bodies.
“There are still lots of people missing from the area,” he said.
Also Tuesday, rebels clashed with government forces near Aleppo’s international airport and the Kweiras military airport nearby, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. Clashes have halted air traffic to the two airports for weeks, since rebels began their offensive to try to capture them.
The human-rights group also reported government shelling, airstrikes and clashes between government forces and rebels east and south of Damascus.
Seven people were killed in rocket strikes on the eastern suburb of Kafar Batna and five died in a car bombing in Jdeidat al-Fadel, southwest of the capital, it said.
The U.N. has said some 70,000 have been killed since the uprising against Assad’sauthoritarian rule began in March 2011. The violence has spread humanitarian suffering across much of Syria.
U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos said the number of people in need of assistance has quadrupled since June last year.
“Just in the last two months, over 250,000 people have fled into neighboring countries. These numbers, they are not sustainable,” she said at a news conference in Geneva.
The U.N. said more than 870,000 Syrians have fled to neighboring countries since the beginning of the conflict, with the majority seeking refuge in Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon.
The United States announced Tuesday that it was providing an additional $19 million in humanitarian assistance in response to urgent needs in Syria.
The announcement made in Geneva by Nancy Lindborg, assistant administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development, raises the United States’ total contribution of humanitarian support in the conflict to nearly $385 million.
Information for this article was contributed by Albert Aji, Bassem Mroue, Ben Hubbard, Frank Jordan and Nataliya Vasilyeva of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 5 on 02/20/2013