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At least 28 dead in air strikes on Syria displaced camp

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said one person at least was killed in rebel shelling overnight of the Midan neighborhood on the government side of the city.

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The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the dead included women and children and the death toll from the air strikes, which hit a camp for internally displaced people near the town of Sarmada, was likely to rise.

The strikes in Idlib province, which is controlled by Syria’s Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front and rebel allies, came as a 48-hour ceasefire took hold in Aleppo city to the east.

Activists say a coalition of Syrian rebels and hard-line jihadists have seized a strategic village from pro-government forces just 6 kilometers (4 miles) from the contested city of Aleppo.

Khatib said the people in the camp had fled fighting in the north of Aleppo province.

“The Syrian Coalition condemns the worldwide community’s silence, which represents direct complicity in Assad’s war against civilians in Syria as it has been interpreted by the regime as a green light to kill more and more Syrians”, the coalition said in a statement, adding that more than 30 people were killed in the attack and dozens were injured.

A auto bomb first exploded in the main square of village of Mukharam al-Fawkani, located about 45 kilometers (28 miles) east of the central city of Homs, Syria’s third-largest.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein said the attacks were nearly certainly a deliberate war crime.

Images posted on social media said to be of the aftermath of the strike showed at least a dozen tents burned to the ground and bloodied women and children being loaded onto a pickup truck.

Syria has been mired in civil war since 2011, with government forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad fighting numerous opposition factions and extremist groups.

On Friday, the Syrian military denied that its warplanes had conducted the airstrikes.

There has been no confirmation of who carried out the attack.

“What was done here can only be compared with what the fascists did in Russian Federation”, said Russia’s culture minister, Vladimir Medinsky, the highest-ranking official to visit Palmyra on Thursday.

The violence came as the northern city of Aleppo witnessed relative calm as US officials announced late Wednesday that an agreement had been reached with Russian Federation to extend Syria’s fragile cease-fire to the deeply contested northern city.

The rebel assault was mounted to disrupt regime forces, say rebel commanders who have long warned of a major offensive in the coming weeks to wrest back the battered insurgent-held districts of a city that remains a key battlefield prize for the government.

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The kingdom, which is already home to more than 630,000 Syrian refugees, introduced additional security checks at the Hadalat and Rokbane border crossings at the start of the year, leading tens of thousands more to congregate along the frontier.

Syrian’s react to the arrival of a Russian military convoy. Pic  AFP