By Agencies

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Fresh violence has erupted in the besieged Syrian city of Homs, a day after armed forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad barraged residential buildings with mortars and machine-gun fire and killed at least 30 people, activists have said.

Heavy gunfire erupted for a second day on Friday in the city, which has seen some of the heaviest violence of the 10-month-old uprising against Assad's rule. Activists said at least 33 people have been killed across the country since Thursday.
 
Elsewhere, a car bomb exploded on Friday at a checkpoint outside the northern city of Idlib, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said, citing witnesses. The number of casualties was not immediately clear.

The head of the Arab League monitoring mission in Syria said that the violence has risen "in a significant way" in the last three days, particularly in Homs, Hama and Idlib.
 
"The situation at present, in terms of violence, does not help prepare the atmosphere ... to get all sides to sit at the negotiating table," General Mohammed Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi said in a statement.
 
The Sudanese general called for "an immediate end to the violence to protect the Syrian people and clear the way for peaceful resolutions" to the crisis.
 
'Terrifying massacre'

The pre-dawn assault in Homs, and reports of similar offensives against Hama and other cities, came hours after the United Nations said it could no longer keep track of the death toll in Syria, which it put at more than 5,400 over a month ago.
 
The Homs raid began in the Karm Al-Zeitoun neighbourhood, with the Syrian Human Rights Observatory reporting 33 people killed in Syria's third-largest city, 160km north of the capital.

Details of Thursday's wave of violence in Homs were emerging from an array of residents and activists on Friday, though they said they were having difficulty because of continuing gunfire.

"There has been a terrifying massacre,'' Rami Abdul-Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told the Associated Press news agency on Friday, calling for an independent investigation of Thursday's killings.
 
The Local Co-ordination Committees (LCC), which organise protests on the ground, said that by Friday regime forces had pounded the Bab Seba neighbourhood with heavy artillery and rocket fire.
 
Fighting was also heard in Baba Amro district. The LCC said three people were killed early on Friday in Homs and said two more were killed in Idlib province in the northwest and one in the Damascus suburbs.
 
The SOHR said another flashpoint central city, Hama, also came under assault in the early hours of Friday, with intense firing from heavy machine guns and loud explosions heard.
 
'Children killed'
 
In the outskirts of Damascus, an 11-year-old boy was killed at a checkpoint in Hamuriyeh, the observatory said, adding that in Aleppo, the country's second-biggest city, two civilians were killed when security forces "fired indiscriminately".

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said on Friday that at least 384 children have been killed during Syria's uprising and virtually the same number have been jailed.
 
"As of January 7, 384 children have been killed, most are boys. Some 380 children have been detained, some less than 14 years old," Rima Salah, acting UNICEF deputy executive director, told reporters in Geneva.
 
UNICEF is concerned about the situation in Syria, which has a legal obligation to protect children and uphold their rights, Salah said.
 
"Our office there is functioning well, we have a dialogue all the time with the government and civil society," she added.
 
The previous death toll for children in Syria was 307, according to a statement by UN human rights chief Navi Pillay on December 2.