As many as 34 people have been killed over the past few hours by Syrian airstrikes against rebel-held areas in northwestern and southern Syria, a monitor group said Wednesday.

The aerial bombardment against areas in the northwestern city of Idlib and its suburb town of Saraqeb killed 24 people, including two children, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The UK-based watchdog group said the strikes targeted a building where civilians had been hiding in, adding that other strikes hit the surroundings of the Abu Alduhur airbase, which is surrounded by the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front in the countryside of Idlib.

In the southern province of Daraa, another hotspot harboring al-Qaida militants near the Jordanian borders, airstrikes by the Syrian air force killed ten people, including seven children, according to the Observatory, whose account couldn't be independently verified.

Meanwhile, the state news agency SANA said Thursday that the Syrian air force targeted convoys of vehicles and weaponry belong to the rebels in the countryside of Idlib, destroying the convoys and killing tens of the militants.

The operation in Aleppo came just a day after the Syrian government forces backed by loyal fighters were said to have repelled an attack by the Nusra Front against the government-controlled district of Jamiyet al-Zahara in the western part of Aleppo city.

The Nusra militants blew up a tunnel under the Aviation Intelligence Headquarter in the aforementioned neighborhood, followed by intense battles that lasted for hours until Tuesday morning.

Opposition activists claimed that panic spread among the residents in the western part of Aleppo, adding that the government started to empty its crucial institutions, such as the museum of Aleppo and the Central Bank.

The Observatory said 40 crude barrel bombs were dropped over Yarmouk since April 4, the day on which the air campaign over the camp has started.

The Yarmouk Camp is a large district in southern Damascus and once home to 160,000 Palestinians and Syrians, most of whom fled the camp with the first entry of the armed militants into the camp in 2012. Endit

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