They defied the continuing crackdown that has killed more than 1,000 people, with hundreds more rounded up in mass arrests. Yesterday, more than 30 protesters were killed in the city of Hamah, according to Rami Abdelrahman, a human rights monitor. That report could not be immediately confirmed.
The boy who was killed, Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, has become a symbol of government oppression after a video of his mutilated body was circulated on YouTube.
“We won’t forgive, we will kill the child killer,’’ chanted protesters in Homs, a center of dissent, according to a witness who gave his name as Mohamed.
Earlier this week, UNICEF issued an unusual statement describing “extreme violence against children in Syria.
“We are particularly disturbed by the recent video images of children who were arbitrarily detained and suffered torture or ill-treatment during their detention, leading in some cases to their death,’’ the statement said.
Although UNICEF has issued more general warnings about the effects of recent unrest in the Middle East on the lives of children there, the statement is the first time since the Arab Spring began that the organization has called on a specific government to investigate what it called “horrific acts’’ against children.
The Internet shutdown severely disrupted the flow of the YouTube videos and Facebook and Twitter posts that have allowed protesters and others to keep track of demonstrations, since foreign media are banned and state media are heavily controlled.
Both land lines and cellphones are so frequently monitored by Syria’s feared secret police that Skype had become a major means of communication among activists, and its loss as a tool may be a blow to the protest movement. Government websites, including those for the Ministry of Oil and the state news agency, SANA, remained online.
Two-thirds of Syria’s Internet network went offline at 6:35 a.m. yesterday, said James Cowie, an analyst at Renesys, an Internet analytic firm, in a cascading blackout that took 30 minutes.
