Syrian state news agency SANA on Thursday confirmed that regime forces were within firing range of the route after advancing in farmland north of Aleppo city.
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The violence comes despite a nationwide truce declared by the government last Wednesday to mark the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr.
The Castello Road leads into the opposition-held eastern half of Aleppo city, which is now effectively besieged by Syrian regime forces.
Rebel fire on the government-held Sayf al-Dawla neighbourhood meanwhile killed five people, including a child, the monitor said.
The attacks, which involved the shelling of government-held neighborhoods and intense street fighting, came just days after the advance by the government side toward the Castello Road.
Before the Syrian Civil War, Aleppo was the industrial and financial capital of Syria.
Russian Federation deployed warplanes to Syria past year to support President Bashar al-Assad against rebels seeking to end his rule, and have supported Syrian government forces in a separate fight against Islamic State further east.
Rebels said they were fighting to retake lost positions and re-secure the road.
In New York, U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said on Friday that the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, is “extremely concerned at the unfolding situation in Aleppo, Syria, particularly the situation for the estimated 300,000 people trapped in the eastern part” of the contested city.
Syrian government and allied forces took control of a rebel-held town east of Damascus after a 12-day battle, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, compromising a supply route into opposition territory.
Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said that despite a heavy assualt, rebels had been unable to advance beause of the “heavy aerial bombardment the regime is carrying out on the areas where fighting is under way”. The Observatory – a British-based organization which says it gets information from a network of sources on the ground – said a previous ceasefire had been a ruse and had been exploited to stage the Castello Road attack.
More than 280,000 people have been killed in Syria since the country’s civil war erupted in 2011, starting with peaceful protests that swiftly escalated into an armed rebellion increasingly dominated by jihadist groups.
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Another aim is to ensure the security of government-controlled areas and to prevent the militant groups from blocking the main road connecting Aleppo with the Syrian coast and other provinces in central and southern Syria.
