Renewed Syrian army bombardment of rebel-held Eastern Ghouta outside Damascus on Monday killed 18 people, despite a ceasefire deal for the region, a monitor said.
The Syrian regime has continued to target the area even though it falls within a network of de-escalation zones -- endorsed by Turkey, Russia, and Iran -- in which acts of aggression are expressly prohibited.
On Monday, air strikes and artillery fire on several parts of Eastern Ghouta killed at least 18 civilians, the Britain-based monitor Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The deaths come a day after at least 23 civilians were killed in the region in regime air strikes and artillery fire, among them four children.
Since Nov. 14, Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, has been the target of fierce regime attacks that have left more than 130 people dead and injured hundreds more.
Rebels have also fired from the area into Damascus in deadly attacks of a kind rarely seen in the capital.
Eastern Ghouta is already in the grip of a humanitarian crisis caused by a crushing regime siege of the area since 2013 that has caused severe food and medical shortages.
Humanitarian access to Eastern Ghouta has remained limited despite the implementation of the ceasefire zone, and a United Nations official has named the region as the "epicentre of suffering" in Syria.
Syria has only just begun to emerge from a devastating civil war that began in 2011 when the Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests with unexpected ferocity.
Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the fighting and more than 10 million displaced, according to claims by the UN.
