Assad regime forces shelled a rebel-held village in the country's northwest on Wednesday, hitting a school and killing at least eight people, opposition activists said.
The attack in Idlib province, the last rebel stronghold Syria, was part of an ongoing offensive in which the regime forces have captured more than 40 villages and hamlets over the past two weeks.
Idlib is home to 3 million civilians. The United Nations has warned of the growing risk of a humanitarian catastrophe in the region, which lies along the Turkish border.
A war-monitoring group, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said a teacher and four students were killed in Sunday's government shelling of the village of Sarmin.
Hadi Abdullah, an Idlib-based opposition activists, gave a slightly higher death toll, saying seven people were killed, including a woman and four children. Different death tolls are common in the immediate aftermath of bombings.
Regime troops have been bombarding parts of Idlib since last month, with the shelling and airstrikes intensifying since the ground offensive began on Dec. 19.
The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that as a result of hostilities, more than 235,000 people had been displaced between Dec. 12 and Dec. 25. Many of them have fled from the town of Maaret al-Numan, toward which the Syrian troops have been steadily advancing.
In December alone, the violence pushed some 284,000 from their homes in the region of some three million people, the United Nations says.
The mass movement of people has seen public buildings such as mosques, garages, wedding halls and schools turned into shelters, UN humanitarian agency OCHA says.
Regime ally Russia announced a ceasefire for Idlib in late August after months of deadly Russian and regime bombardment that killed around 1,000 civilians.
But sporadic clashes and bombardment persisted throughout the autumn before a spike in violence in the past month, the Observatory says.
Syria's civil war has killed more than 370,000 people since it started in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-government protests.
In total 11,215 people including more than 1,000 children were killed during the war last year, although it was the least deadly year on record since the beginning of the conflict.
