AMMAN: Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces rained rockets and bombs down on opposition-held neighborhoods of the city of Homs Wednesday, reducing buildings to rubble and killing more than 80 people, including two Western journalists.

The barrages marked an intensification of a nearly three-week offensive to crush resistance in Homs, one of the focal points of a nationwide uprising against Assad’s 11-year rule, and prompted further international censure.

More than 60 bodies, both rebel fighters and civilians, were recovered from one area of Homs’ Baba Amro neighborhood after an afternoon bombardment, adding to 21 killed earlier in the day, activists said.

“Helicopters flew reconnaissance overhead then the bombardment started,” Homs activist Abu Abei said.

Videos uploaded by opposition activists showed smashed buildings, deserted streets and doctors treating wounded civilians in primitive conditions in Baba Amro, the main target of Assad’s wrath.

“President Assad wants to finish the Homs situation by Sunday to prepare for the constitutional referendum. Then he will turn to Idlib,” a Lebanese official who is close to the Syrian government told Reuters in Beirut.

The devastation has caused outcry but Wednesday’s carnage only showed how helpless Western powers are in their efforts to stop the bloodshed.

The United States, which so far has been against military intervention in Syria, hinted however that if a political solution to the crisis was impossible it might have to consider other options.

The worsening humanitarian situation in Homs and other embattled towns is bound to dominate “Friends of Syria” talks in Tunis Friday involving the United States, European and Arab countries, Syria’s neighbor Turkey and other nations clamoring for Assad to halt the bloodshed and relinquish power.

In an effort to bring relief to starving and bloodied civilians in Homs, the International Committee of the Red Cross was in talks with the Syrian government Wednesday to arrange a pause in the fighting.

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah has told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that any dialogue about the crisis engulfing Syria would at present lead nowhere, criticizing Russia’s decision earlier this month to veto a U.N. Security Council resolution. “As for now, any discussion about the situation [in Syria] would be fruitless,” the Saudi state news agency SPA quoted the Saudi monarch as saying during a telephone conversation with Medvedev Wednesday.

“It would have been better if our Russian friends coordinated with the Arabs before using the veto in the Security Council,” the king said. “We cannot abandon our religious and moral position toward the situation in Syria.”

Russia, Assad’s main arms supplier and seen as retaining some leverage over him, said it was seeking safe passage of aid convoys to civilians trapped in the violence. France also appealed to Assad to halt the onslaught to allow safe passage for aid.

U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos will head to Syria soon in an attempt to secure access for aid workers seeking to deliver emergency relief to people trapped in the country’s conflict zones, the United Nations said Wednesday.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy called the deaths of the two journalists, French photographer Remi Ochlik and American Marie Colvin of Britain’s Sunday Times, an assassination and said the Assad era had to end.

“That’s enough now,” Sarkozy said. “This regime must go and there is no reason that Syrians don’t have the right to live their lives and choose their destiny freely. If journalists were not there, the massacres would be a lot worse.”

The two foreign journalists were killed when the house in which they were staying after sneaking over the Lebanese border into Homs was hit by rockets.

The last dispatch from Colvin – a veteran war reporter who wore a trademark black eye-patch since being wounded in Sri Lanka in 2001 – described the misery inside Baba Amro.

Women and children were crammed together into a basement, huddled in fear and a 2-year-old child had died in front of her, she reported on British radio.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights said regime forces killed a total of more than 80 civilians in Homs Wednesday, mostly in bombardments on Baba Amro.

Several hundred people have been killed in the daily bombardments by the besieging forces using artillery, rockets, sniper fire and Soviet-built T-72 tanks.

Ground forces have held off from entering opposition areas as fighters allied to the opposition are ready to take them on.

The army is preventing medical supplies from going in and electricity is cut off 15 hours a day, activists say. Hospitals, schools and most workplaces and shops are shut and government offices have also closed.

As the Lebanese official explained it, Assad wants to batter Homs into submission before a referendum this Sunday on a new constitution leading to multiparty elections as a way to resolve the crisis.

His plan has the support of his allies Russia and China, but Western powers have dismissed it as a joke under the present circumstances and the Syrian opposition has called for a boycott.

The ICRC issued a public appeal Tuesday to Syrian authorities and rebels to agree on a two-hour truce each day to allow life-saving supplies to reach civilians and to evacuate the growing number of wounded from Homs and elsewhere.

ICRC spokeswoman Carla Hadda said she was unable to say if and when a deal might be clinched.

“The situation is difficult and we are worried it is deteriorating,” she told Reuters Wednesday. “Everybody is focused on Homs but we shouldn’t turn a blind eye to what is happening in other areas.”

Army bombardments on the town of Khan Sheikhoun, north of Homs on the Damascus-Aleppo highway in Idlib province, killed two people Wednesday, the London-based Syrian Network said.

Elsewhere in Idlib, seven people, including a 5-year-old boy, were killed by gunfire during security force raids into villages of the northwestern province of Idlib, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

A senior official of the opposition Syrian National Council said it wanted a minimum of three entry points for aid to enter Syria – from Lebanon into Homs, from Jordan into Deraa and Turkey into Idlib.

Basma Kodmani, speaking to reporters in Geneva after talks with the ICRC, said Russia should put pressure on Assad to agree.

In Moscow, Russia said it was working on ensuring the secure transit of humanitarian aid but safe corridors themselves were not a good idea because they might lead to further violence.

“It’s logical to consider that if something goes wrong, the use of force would be permitted,” Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov told reporters in Moscow.

“This would only aggravate the conflict.”