DAMASCUS, Syria: Muslims began observing the dawn-to-dusk fast for the month of Ramadan across the Middle East on Wednesday, even as the region is shaken by the crisis in Egypt and the U.N. food agency warned that Syria’s civil war has left 7 million people in need of food aid.

Ramadan this year comes during the harsh Mideast summer, and governments in the region took steps to help alleviate the fast, offering shorter working hours, promising less power cuts and even distributing food to weary motorists.

The Muslim lunar calendar moves back through the seasons, so Ramadan starts 11 days earlier each year under the Western calendar.

For most Sunnis and Shiites, Ramadan started on Wednesday while others are expected to begin observing the holy month on Thursday — differences based on various interpretations of sightings of the new moon.

Despite its apparent harshness, many Muslims eagerly anticipate Ramadan, the month when they believe God revealed the first verses of the Muslim holy book, the Quran, to the Prophet Muhammad. Streets are decorated with colorful lanterns, families feast together at night, the devout pray even more and regional cooking shows obsess over new takes on classic dishes for the Ramadan evening meal that breaks the daytime fasting.

Bahraini men gather to search the sky over the Persian Gulf for the crescent moon in the western vil …

But the hardships in Syria, where the civil war is now in its third year, have eroded much of the Ramadan joy.

On Wednesday, the World Food Program said it needed $27 million every month to deal with the growing ranks of Syrians made hungry because of the war. If the organization did not provide for them, “they simply will not eat,” said Muhannad Hadi, WFP’s emergency coordinator in Syria.

Syria’s conflict erupted in March 2011 as an Arab Spring-inspired uprising against President Bashar Assad’s regime. It has since descended into a civil war that has killed over 93,000 people, displaced over 5 million and turned over 1.5 million into refugees, according to U.N. figures.

“People come by the kitchen just begging for scraps, it tears the heart,” said an activist in the rebel-held northern Syrian city of Maarat al-Numan.

The activist, who identified himself only by his nickname, Abu Anas, fearing for his own safety, said rebel activists were using a communal kitchen to distribute a simple Ramadan evening meal of rice, vegetable stew and soup to some 400 of the town’s neediest families.

A Lebanese man reads a Quran, the Muslim holy book, at a mosque in Beirut, Lebanon, Wednesday, July  …

Food prices have risen five-fold in Syria over the past months and shortages in fuel are widespread. Farmers have abandoned their fields, setting the stage for a broader disaster next year, the WFP has warned.

The Syrian currency fell further, to 280 pounds for one U.S. dollar on Wednesday, after recovering from a record low of 310 pounds to the dollar on Tuesday. The falling pound is likely to further push up prices.

“I can’t buy necessities anymore,” lamented Qassem al-Zamel, a 37-year-old employee in Damascus. “”Yesterday, I bought 2 kilograms of potatoes, one kilogram of beans and two kilograms of tomatoes with 1,000 pounds. I stopped buying meat.”

Supermarket owner Adib Mardini, 62, said he was changing food prices by the hour on some days but there were few shoppers around. “People have run out of money,” he said.

By contrast, police in the oil-rich Gulf Emirate of Abu Dhabi planned to distribute nearly 30,000 sunset meals to drivers at gas stations or traffic lights in an attempt to prevent traffic accidents by speeding motorists rushing home for iftar, the meal that breaks the fast.

Lebanese men pray and read the Quran, the Muslim holy book, at a mosque in Beirut, Lebanon, Wednesda …

With temperatures in Dubai and elsewhere reaching 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), authorities ordered reduced working hours.

In the Palestinian territories, the local self-government reduced the working day to five hours. The Palestinian minister of religious affairs, Mahmoud al-Habbash, said this would give people enough time for worshipping God.

“People, who spend long parts of the night praying …. should be given enough time to have some sleep in the morning,” said Mahmoud Al-Habbash.

In Egypt, where the military deposed Islamist President Mohammed Morsi last week following days of massive protests against his rule, the new interim leader called for reconciliation in Ramadan, traditionally a period for Muslims to promote unity.

BEIRUT: More than 100,000 people have been killed since the start of Syria’s conflict over two years ago, an activist group said Wednesday.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has been tracking the death toll in the conflict through a network of activists in Syria, released its death toll at a time when hopes for a negotiated settlement to end the civil war fade.

It said it had tallied a total of 100,191 deaths over the 27 months of the conflict, but Observatory chief Rami Abdul-Rahman said he expected the real number was higher as neither side was totally forthcoming about its losses.

Of the dead, 36,661 are civilians, the group said.

On the government side, 25,407 are members of President Bashar Assad’s armed forces, 17,311 are pro-government fighters and 169 are militants from Lebanon’s Hezbollah, who have fought alongside army troops.

Deaths among Assad’s opponents included 13,539 rebels, 2,015 army defectors and 2,518 foreign fighters battling against the regime.

Entry of the foreign media into Syria is severely restricted and few reports from the fighting can be independently verified.

Earlier this month, the U.N. put the number of those killed in the conflict at 93,000 between March 2011 when the crisis started and end of April this year.

The government has not released death tolls. The state media published the names of the government’s dead in the first months of the crisis, but then stopped publishing its losses after the opposition became an armed insurgency.

Abdul-Rahman said that the group’s tally of army casualties is based on information from military medical sources, records obtained by the group from state agencies and activists’ own count of military funerals in government areas of the country. Another source for regime fatalities are activist videos showing dead soldiers killed in rebel-held areas who are later identified.

Abdul-Rahman believes the number of combatants killed on both sides is probably much higher as neither the government nor the rebels are fully transparent about battlefield casualties.

Syria’s conflict began as peaceful protests against Assad’s rule. It gradually became an armed conflict after the Assad’s regime used the army to crackdown on dissent and some opposition supporters took up weapons to fight government troops.

Even the most modest international efforts to end the Syrian conflict have failed. U.N.’s special envoy to Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, told reporters on Tuesday that an international peace conference proposed by Russia and the U.S. will not take place until later in the summer, partly because of opposition disarray.

The fighting has increasingly been taking sectarian overtones. Sunni Muslims dominate the rebel ranks while Assad’s regime is dominated by Alawites, an offshoot sect of Shiite Islam.

It has also spilled over Syria’s borders, especially into Lebanon, where factions supporting opposing sides have clashed in the northern city of Tripoli and in the eastern Bekaa valley. Lebanese are divided over Syria’s civil war with some supporting President Bashar Assad’s regime and others backing the opposition. More than 550,000 Syrians have fled to neighboring Lebanon as a result of the war.

Earlier this week, sectarian tensions drew Lebanon’s weak army into fighting. Eighteen soldiers were killed in a two-day battle between the army and supporters of a radical Sunni sheik in the southern city of Sidon. The army had earlier reported 17 deaths and said Wednesday that another soldier died of his wounds in a hospital.

The conflict reached the capital Beirut on Wednesday when masked men ambushed a bus and attacked the approximately 30 people aboard with knives, a Lebanese official said. He said 10 people were wounded in the attack in the eastern part of the city, including five Syrians, two Palestinians and three Lebanese, the officials said. He spoke anonymously in line with regulations.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said the bus was carrying Syrians headed to a TV studio in the eastern Sunday Market district to take part in a cultural program. It said there were eight attackers, who fled the area.

The conflict has also polarized the region. Several Gulf states including Sunni-majority Saudi Arabia, Washington’s key ally and a foe of Iran, back the rebels. Tehran, a Shiite powerhouse, supports Assad.

BEIRUT: Syrian troops backed by pro-government gunmen swept into a Sunni village in the mountains near the Mediterranean coast on Thursday, killing dozens of people, including women and children, and torching homes, activists said.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that at least 50 people — and possibly as many as 100 — were killed in the violence in Bayda, a village outside the city of Banias. It cited witnesses who said some of the dead were killed with knives or blunt objects and that dozens of villagers were still missing.

Syria’s civil war has largely split the country down religious lines, and the violence in Bayda appeared to have sectarian overtones. The village is primarily inhabited by Sunni Muslims, who dominate the country’s rebel movement, while most of the surrounding villages are home to members of PresidentBashar Assad’s Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

With the conflict now in its third year, the sectarian divide in the country is worsening. There has been heavy fighting raging between Sunni and Shiite villages in the area of Qusair, near the Lebanese border. Islamic extremists who have joined the rebels have destroyed Christian liquor stores, and sometimes refer to their dead adversaries with derogatory names insulting their sects.

Observatory director Rami Abdul-Rahman said there was heavy fighting in Bayda early Thursday that left at least six government troops dead and more than 20 wounded. He said regime troops backed by gunmen from nearby Alawite villages returned in the afternoon and eventually overran Bayda.

In the aftermath, telephone and Internet service to the village was cut and the area remained under regime control, making it impossible to verify the day’s final death toll, Abdul-Rahman said.

But if confirmed, the violence would be the latest in a string of alleged mass killings in Syria’s bloody civil war. Last month, activists said government troops killed more than 100 people as they seized two rebel-held suburbs of Damascus.

Some 70,000 people have been killed and thousands of others maimed, injured or missing in Syria since the uprising against Assad began in March 2011, according to the United Nations. Both the U.N. Human Rights Council and the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria have published multiple reports documenting crimes committed during the civil war, including the slaughter of more than 100 civilians in the central region of Houla last May blamed on pro-regime militiamen.

The conflict’s humanitarian toll has accelerated as the fighting on the ground has grown more intense, and neither side appears willing to find a political solution at the moment. The rebels are trying to expand upon their gains in the past year that have put them in control of much of northern Syria as well as a growing foothold in the south along the border with Jordan.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Local Coordination Committees say that the rocket landed in the village of Abu Taltal in Aleppo province after midnight Wednesday. The groups frequently report government bombardment of rebel-dominated regions.

The Observatory said a father, mother and four children whose ages raged between two and 11 were killed. The LCC said the family name was Hazrouni. Syria’s crisis began in March 2011 and has killed more than 60,000 people, the U.N. says.