Syria risks military strikes, warns Hague Britain's foreign secretary on Sunday refused to rule out a western military intervention in Syria, after clashes in Damascus and dozens more deaths nationwide were reported in a conflict he compared to Bosnia's 1990s sectarian civil war. William Hague admitted a military intervention would be far more complex than the Nato operation that helped topple Libya's Col Muammer Gaddafi, but said it could not be excluded if Syria's spiral into chaos continued. Syrian opposition activists claimed the regime had launched a renewed offensive in the central city of Homs, while UN monitors were probing fighting that rocked parts of Damascus late on Friday. International alarm about the bloody conflict has deepened after two massacres in the past few weeks in the central areas of Houla and Qubeir, in which a total of well over 100 people - including dozens of children - were killed. "It is looking more like Bosnia in the 1990s, being on the edge of a sectarian conflict in which neighbouring villages are attacking and killing each other," Mr Hague told Sky News. I don't think we can rule anything out. Activists said forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad's regime had again begun shelling of Homs, where a bombardment earlier this year launched months of heavy bloodshed as the government's crackdown was met by a violent response from the armed opposition. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition-aligned UK-based group that monitors the death toll in the conflict, said at least 33 people died around the country on Saturday, as both sides broke a ceasefire in force for almost two months but routinely breached. UN peace monitors found only body parts and animal corpses when they finally entered Qubeir at the weekend to investigate a massacre last week for which the regime denies responsibility, blaming terrorists instead. The government has not explained why its security forces blocked the UN observers from entering Qubeir on Friday, during which time it appears the victims" bodies were taken away. While Mr Hague's reference to Bosnia recalled the Nato-led operation in that country in the mid-1990s, when almost 60,000 troops were deployed, diplomats and other observers says intervention in Syria is highly unlikely without Russian and Chinese support. Those countries have twice blocked UN Security Council action against Mr Assad and have repeatedly underscored their opposition to outside intervention in a near 15-month conflict estimated to have killed more than 10,000 people. Russia has floated the idea of an international conference likened by some to the Dayton process that ended Bosnia's three-year war in 1985, but Washington is unhappy with Moscow's demand that Iran - Mr Assad's most important Middle Eastern ally - be involved. In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister, told his cabinet before the weekly meeting that the Syrian government was carrying out a "massacre" and charged that Iran and the Lebanese Shia group Hizbollah were aiding Syria. Mr Netanyahu added: "The world must see this axis of evil and understand what kind of environment we live in." In Istanbul, the Syrian National Council, the main umbrella group for Mr Assad's opponents in exile, elected a Kurdish activist as its new leader. Abdelbasset Sida takes over from Burhan Ghalioun, who has led the SNC since its foundation in August but announced last month that he would step down after infighting over his leadership. Critics of the SNC say it has failed to unify the opposition and has become increasingly disconnected from, and ignored by, both activists on the ground and the Free Syrian Army, the active but loose network of anti-regime militias Additional reporting by Vita Bekker in Tel Aviv