Seven children were among eight people killed in a fierce shelling by Syrian regime forces on villages south of Idlib province.
Nine other people, mostly children, were also injured during the attack, local sources confirmed.
A family of five was among those killed, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights
It killed five members of the same family – a man, his wife, and their three children – in the village of Iblin, as well as two children in the village of Balyun, and two more children in the village of Balshun, the sources added.
Since 2011, the war in Syria has killed an estimated 387,118 people by December 2020, among them 116,911 civilians.
The toll did not include 205,300 people who it said were missing and presumed dead, including 88,000 civilians believed to have died of torture in government-run prisons.
Almost 12,000 children have been killed or wounded during the events.
The conflict has also left dozens of devastated cities and hundreds of thousands displaced in other countries.
Some 6.7 million are internally displaced, many of them living in camps, while another 5.6 million are registered as refugees abroad.
Neighbouring Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, which are hosting 93% of them, have struggled to cope with one of the largest refugee exoduses in recent history. One million Syrian refugee children have been born in exile.
UN war crimes investigators have accused all parties of perpetrating “the most heinous violations”.
