BEIRUT — Syria blamed “terrorist” bomb-makers on Thursday for an explosion that ripped through a building and killed 16 people in the restive city of Hama, where hostility to President Bashar al-Assad runs deep.

Members of the first U.N. monitoring team in Syria, together with members of the Syrian Free Army, visit Homs April 21, 2012. Syrian authorities allowed a team of United Nations ceasefire monitors to enter the battered city of Homs on Saturday. Picture taken April 21, 2012. REUTERS

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based anti-Assad organization tracking the 13-month-old conflict in which at least 9,000 people have died, gave the same death toll but said the cause of Wednesday afternoon’s blast was not clear.

The Local Coordination Committees, a grassroots opposition group, had said earlier that a military rocket had inflicted the carnage and put the death toll at more than 50.

Whatever its origins, the blast dealt another blow to a two-week-old U.N.-backed truce that has failed to halt violence on both sides of the conflict, one of a string of uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa against autocratic rule.

An activist said seven civilians and two rebel militiamen were killed in fighting in the eastern city of Deir al-Zor, while a resident of Zamalka on the outskirts of Damascus reported intense gun-battles.

“There have been heavy clashes today, really heavy over the past couple hours,” the man said. “I couldn’t get close enough to see. There are checkpoints everywhere.”

Meanwhile the state news agency, SANA, said a school headmaster was blown up in a booby-trapped car in the northern city of Aleppo, and an “armed terrorist group” had shot dead four members of the same family in Erbin near Damascus.

It also said two members of the security forces were killed in Deir al-Zor.

United Nations monitors charged with checking the ceasefire engineered by U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan are trickling in and two are now based permanently in Hama, where many thousands of people were killed when Assad’s late father, Hafez al-Assad, crushed an armed Islamist uprising 30 years ago.

Activists have been dismayed at the pace of the observer deployment, and a senior U.N. official said this week it would take a month to put the first 100 monitors on the ground.

Only 15 are in place so far out of an envisaged full-strength team of 300 to be led by Norwegian General Robert Mood.

SANA said four monitors from Russia, Syria’s most powerful ally, were on their way.

The killing of a Syrian Arab Red Crescent volunteer on Tuesday underscores the dangers the monitors may face.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said three other aid workers were wounded when the clearly marked ambulance in which they were traveling came under fire near Damascus.

Syria says it has completed withdrawing tanks and troops from populated areas in line with Annan’s peace plan, but the former U.N. chief said on Tuesday Damascus had failed to meet all its commitments and the situation remained “unacceptable.”

Foreign Minister Walid Moualem is reported to have told him that there had been “more than 1,149 documented and verifiable violations from armed elements” since the ceasefire began.

France, leading Western calls for tougher action against Assad, says it planned to push next month for a “Chapter 7” Security Council resolution if Assad’s forces did not pull back.

Chapter 7 of the U.N. charter allows the Council to authorize actions which can include military force. But Western powers have disavowed any intention to intervene militarily in Syria, as they did last year in Libya.

The U.N. is drawing up a major humanitarian effort for more than a million people affected by the conflict. A report seen by Reuters on Thursday said sewage networks had been damaged and water contaminated, setting the stage for outbreaks of water-borne diseases such as cholera.

Meanwhile, in Paris, exiled Syrian businessman Nofal Dawalibi announced on Thursday the setting up of a “transitional government to answer the needs of the Syrian opposition.”

“The situation in Syria is getting worse every day. Chaos is rising,” said Dawalibi, whose father Maarrouf was Syrian prime minister before President Bashar al-Assad’s Baath party took power in 1963.

“We have decided to replace existing structures with a purely executive structure which coordinates the operations of the divisions fighting for freedom and follows the will of the sovereign Syrian people,” he told reporters.

He did not specify how the “transitional government” would coordinate with the Syrian National Council (SNC) headed by exiled academic Burhan Ghalioun that is considered the Syrian opposition’s most representative political body.

Armed opposition to President Bashar al-Assad’s regime is centred on the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

Dawalibi claimed that “many” members of the SNC and the FSA backed his transitional government, although others were subject to “pressure.”

“Unfortunately the SNC, which chose a legislative body while ours is an executive body, could not prove that its structure represents the Syrian people and the revolution,” he said.

The “transitional government’s” objectives are to arm anti-regime fighters, to implement “direct international military intervention” and ensure the return of security and stability to Syria,” Dawalibi said.

The names of the 35 Syrians making up the “transitional government”, described as civilians and soldiers within Syria, “will for security reasons be announced in a few days,” he said.

Critics have said the UN mission was simply allowing the regime to buy time as it presses its crackdown against what began as a popular revolt but has turned into an insurgency.

The opposition Syrian National Council called on Tuesday for Arab foreign ministers who are due to meet on Thursday to back a return to the UN Security Council for enforcement action against the regime.

“The regime is not respecting its commitments, so we must go to the Security Council to get a vote on a Chapter Seven resolution to set up secure zones in the country and be able to deliver humanitarian aid,” its leader Burhan Ghaliun told reporters after talks with Egyptian leaders in Cairo.

After talks with Arab and Western foreign ministers in Paris on Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Chapter Seven measures could involve “travel, financial sanctions, an arms embargo, and the pressure that will give us on the regime to push for compliance with Kofi Annan’s six-point plan.” Arab foreign ministers backed the plan to vote on a Chapter seven resolution.

But Clinton admitted that Damascus ally Moscow — which has a veto on the Security Council — would probably not allow such a motion to pass, and said in the meantime states would have to seek further diplomatic and economic sanctions.

France, however, has warned the Syrian government that if it does not carry out the international peace plan, military action against Damascus is possible. French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said France could push for the Security Council action under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter. Juppe also demanded that the 300 UN observers authorized to go into Syria be deployed within 15 days. “We think this mediation should be given a chance, on the condition that the deployment of the observer mission happens quickly,” he stated.

 -Reuters, BBC, MEO, Daily Star and TAAN