Regime airstrikes on Tuesday killed nine civilians in rebel-held northwest Syria, the target of months of regime and Russian bombardment, a war monitor said.
Three children were among the 12 killed outside Maaret al-Numan, a town located in a southern strip of Idlib province, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The death toll is expected to rise due to critical wounds sustained by some other victims, according to the Britain-based monitoring group.
Russian and Syrian regime aircraft have ramped up strikes on Idlib since late April, killing more than 600 civilians, while 52 others have died from rebel fire, according to the Observatory.
Regime forces have also been locked in battle with jihadists and allied rebels on the edges of the bastion, which is held by Syria's former Al-Qaeda affiliate Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, including the north of Hama province.
The group in January took full administrative control of the Idlib region, home to three million people, although other jihadist groups and rebel factions are also present.
Idlib and its surrounding areas are supposed to be protected from a massive regime offensive by a September 2018 deal between Russia and rebel backer Turkey.
A buffer zone planned under that accord was never fully implemented, and the region has seen an uptick in violence.
(In the adjacent Aleppo province, a 13-year-old Siba al-Daddo died of a heart attack due to the regime bombing on her rebel-held, local activists said Monday.
The heavy aerial and ground bombardment on the town of al-Eys in the southern countryside of Aleppo was brutal to the extent of squeezing the heart of Syrian children, activists said.
Seba was a displaced girl who fled with her seven-member family from of Khan Sheikhoun, the town that was hit by chemical weapons in April 2018.
The regime media on Sunday has justified the heavy offnesive on rebel-held areas in Aleppo to the death of six civilians in a suspected Tahrir al-Sham rocket on Aleppo city, which the regime retook full control of at the end of 2016.
Pro-regime newspaper Al-Watan said Sunday on its Telegram messaging app that the "(regime) army has been responding to terrorist attacks... with salvos of rockets".
Syria's war has killed a total of more than 560,000 people and displaced millions since it started in 2011 with a brutal crackdown on anti-government protests.
Zaman Al Wasl, AFP
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