AMMAN/WASHINGTON: Security forces shot dead up to 36 people in Syria Tuesday and rebels killed seven police in an ambush, activists said, after the U.N. human rights chief put the death toll from nine months of protest against President Bashar Assad at 5,000.

Meanwhile, the United States called on Russia to join U.N. Security Council action on Syria after Moscow was accused of blocking any council decision Monday.

The bloodshed in the northern province of Idlib, which borders Turkey, highlighted the accelerating violence in Syria where an armed rebellion has begun to overshadow what started as peaceful street protests against Assad’s 11-year rule.

The United Nations’ Navi Pillay said the death toll was 1,000 higher than an estimate she released 10 days earlier. It includes civilians, army defectors and those executed for refusing to shoot civilians, but not soldiers or security personnel killed by opposition forces, she said.

The Syrian government has said more than 1,100 members of the army, police and security services have been killed and state media reported 17 military funerals Tuesday for victims of “terrorist armed groups.”

Pillay said Syria’s actions could constitute crimes against humanity, issuing a fresh call for the U.N. Security Council to refer the situation to the International Criminal Court.

“It was the most horrifying briefing that we’ve had in the Security Council over the last two years,” British Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant said after the session, which was arranged despite opposition from Russia, China and Brazil.

The sharp rise in the death toll is bound to lend weight to those arguing for increased international intervention to stop the bloodshed in Syria which some fear is increasingly drifting toward civil war.

Assad, 46, whose minority Alawite family has held power over majority Sunni Muslim Syria for four decades, faces the most serious challenge to his rule from the turmoil which erupted in the southern city of Deraa on March 18.

A violent security crackdown failed to halt the unrest – inspired by popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya – which turned bloodier in the last few months as defecting soldiers join armed civilians in fighting back in some areas.

Mutineers from Syria’s army have banded together to set up the Free Syrian Army whose gunmen have been active in Homs to try to counter pro-Assad snipers who residents say attempt to intimidate the population into submission.

In the latest violence around dawn Tuesday, security forces shot dead 21 people in the northern protest hotbed of Idlib, including nine killed in one incident shortly after dawn, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Activists in the province told Reuters that the nine people were killed when inhabitants of the town of Kfar Yahmour came under fire after they burned tires to block a convoy carrying security forces and pro-Assad militia members.

Two more were shot dead and 19 were wounded when security forces opened fire to break up a funeral procession, which now often become impromptu protests.

The Observatory said army deserters attacked a convoy carrying security forces, killing at least seven people. There was no immediate report from state media of the attack, but the SANA news agency said security forces killed several members of an “armed terrorist group” in Idlib.

SANA also said border guards foiled an attempt by “an armed terrorist group” to cross into Syria from Turkey Monday, the second such reported incident in a week. It said they shot dead two of the 15-strong group.

Syria has barred most independent journalists, making it hard to assess conflicting accounts of events there.

Despite the spiraling violence, Syrian authorities held local elections Monday as part of what they say is a reform process, but Assad’s critics described the voting as irrelevant.

“Now that the number of 5,000 victims has been surpassed, the question is how many deaths will there have to be before some [U.N.] Security Council members will open their eyes to see the situation,” French Foreign Ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said in Paris Tuesday. “We have only one objective on this dramatic issue and it is the end of the violence.”

But France’s ambassador to the United Nations ruled out using military force for now in Syria saying everything had to be done politically to avoid Syria and the Middle East as a whole being set “ablaze.”

“It’s is not just the humanitarian situation we have to worry about, but the risk that Syria slides into civil war and that the whole region is set on fire,” Gerard Araud told a French private television station.”We need a political situation and to put pressure on the Assad regime.”

When asked if France and the United States were thinking of unilateral action or helping train and equip the Free Syrian Army, Araud said: “For now what is at stake is the action of the Arab League. Every country has a specific set of circumstances. There was Libya, but Syria is completely different. Nobody is thinking of a military solution because the dangers would be huge for the region.”

According to briefing notes seen by Reuters in New York, Pillay said that “independent, credible and corroborated accounts demonstrate that ... abuses have taken place as part of a widespread and systematic attack on civilians.”

More than 14,000 people were reportedly in detention, at least 12,400 had sought refuge in neighboring countries and tens of thousands had been internally displaced, she said, also citing “alarming reports” of moves against the city of Homs.

Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said he too was troubled by Pillay’s report, but said outside intervention could lead to civil war and a far higher death toll.

He repeated accusations that Western countries had gone into “regime-change mode,” adding, “the tragedy is that if things were allowed to degenerate and to go in the direction of further provocation, of fanning further confrontation, then maybe [there would be] hundreds of thousands dead.”

In Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov slammed as “immoral” Western accusations it was blocking U.N. action condemning the crackdown by Syrian authorities. Moscow said then that the action was one-sided and argued Tuesday that “armed extremist groups” were becoming increasingly reckless as Western pressure on Assad grew.

U.S. State Department spokeswomen Victoria Nuland replied to Lavrov from Washington later Tuesday, urging Russia to join Security Council action on Syria. “We think it’s the Assad regime that is immoral in the violence it’s perpetrating on its own people.”

Nuland said that there have been “some instances” where the opposition has carried out armed attacks against the government, but the opposition movement has “been peaceful” in general.

But she said Russia should support Arab League calls to admit monitors and a free press if it wants to have any chance of supporting its claims of violence being perpetrated on both sides.

“That’s the best way to assess what’s really going on and to ensure a balanced picture that the Russians themselves claim is needed,” Nuland said.