Hama besieged and air strike on Homs kills dozens

 Regime forces on Wednesday launched an offensive on Hama London, Damascus – Agencies The White House has dismissed President Assad's plans for a new Syrian constitution as "laughable", Reuters reported. "It makes a mockery of the Syrian revolution," White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters aboard Air Force One as President Obama headed to Wisconsin.
"Promises of reforms have been usually followed by increase in brutality and have never been delivered upon by this regime since the beginning of peaceful demonstrations in Syria," he said.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported that Assad's regime is using technology from a Dublin-based company to filter mobile phone text messages. Bloomberg's report read as follows: "The filtering of text messages has curbed the protesters' ability to use technologies that helped organise and fuel dissent in other countries across the Middle East."
Egypt has issued its strongest statement on Syria yet, calling for "peaceful and real change that responds to the aspirations of the Syrian people," UK newspaper "The Guardian" reported.
"The situation in Syria is deteriorating quickly ... The time has come for the required change to avoid a complete explosion," said Egyptian foreign minister Mohamed Kamel Amr He added that the crisis needed an Arab solution and rejected military intervention.
Syrian activist network the "Local Coordination Committees" (LCC) said 20 people were killed in in Syria on Wednesday, 11 of which were in Idlib and four in Homs.
Regime forces on Wednesday launched an offensive on Hama, firing on residential neighbourhoods from armoured vehicles and mobile anti-aircraft guns, Reuters reported opposition activists as saying.
Several people had been injured by rocket and mortar fire in the districts of Arbain, Amiriya, Faraiya, Elilat, Bashura and Bab Qibli, and all telecommunications had been cut, activists added.
During the night, activists said the Hamidiyya district came under a constant hail of machine-gunfire.
They said that for the first time, multiple rocket launchers were seen being taken through the city towards the embattled quarter, where fighters from the rebel Free Syrian Army, a group of army defectors, were believed to be entrenched.
The government has said little about the latest clashes, but state media reported that security forces had seized large quantities of weapons.
Explosions rattled two neighborhoods in Hama, stormed by military forces Wednesday morning, the observatory said. It said landlines, cell phone communication and Internet access in Hama were cut off, leaving the city under siege.
Troops shelled Sunni Muslim neighbourhoods in Homs on the 13th day of their bombardment. The city has been at the forefront of the uprising against 42 years of rule by Assad and his late father Hafez.
Earlier in the afternoon the LCC reported that the government forces were shelling the Abed Allah Bin Zebeir mosque in Baba Amr, Homs.
Wednesday morning also saw an explosion hit a major oil pipeline in the Syrian city of Homs, near a large Sunni Muslim district under bombardment by government forces.
It was not clear what caused the explosion. The pipeline, which runs from the Rumeilan fields in the eastern Syrian Desert to the Homs refinery, one of two in the country, has been hit several times before during the uprising.
Authorities have accused “terrorist saboteurs” of hitting the pipeline, while opposition activists said the military, which began firing shells, mortar rounds and rockets into Baba Amro on February 3, has been hitting it by mistake.
Syrian ambassador in Moscow Riad Haddad however blamed his country's problems on outside forces.
"Almost the entire world is fighting a bloody war against Syria. It is being fought on all levels: diplomatic, economic, in the media and by military means," the ambassador was quoted as saying.
"This is the work of armed terrorist groups which are being financed from outside."
About the possibility of President Bashar Al-Assad stepping down, he said: "There is no chance of it at all. The president of our country is legitimate and was elected by a majority of the people."
Meanwhile, as residential buildings continue to burn in Hama and Homs, the Syrian Foreign Ministry accused the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights of turning "a blind eye to facts", two days after she said the regime was complicit in the deaths of thousands.
As the state-run news agency SANA reported, the foreign ministry sent a letter to Navi Pillay rejecting her allegations and insisting the government remained committed to "keeping order and uprooting terrorism."
"Syria is the only one responsible for protecting the Syrian people, and that no-one has the right or the authority to demand foreign interference which would kill innocents and destroy public and private property," said the statement.
As international pressure on Assad's regime mounts, the United Nations General Assembly will vote Thursday on a new resolution calling on Assad to put a stop to deadly attacks on civilians, diplomats said.
The resolution drawn up by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which was given to member nations on Tuesday, also expresses support for the Arab League's plan to end the 11-month crackdown in Syria and calls for the naming of a UN special envoy.
Syria on the other hand is to hold referendum over its new constitution on February 26.
Syria's state-run news agency SANA announced that President Assad set the date for a national referendum on the country's new draft constitution.
The document was handed over to Assad last week by members of the drafting committee. The new draft reportedly leaves out a clause that says the ruling Baath party is the "leader of the nation and society."
Amendments to the constitution were a key demand by opposition groups at the beginning of the uprising against Assad in March, but the groups now say they accept nothing less than Assad's departure.
The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) on Wednesday urged greater diplomatic pressure to force Syria's government to negotiate with the opposition but said it was against the use of foreign military intervention.
Secretary General of the 57-member organisation, Ekmeleddin Ihsanolu, told an audience in Canberra that military intervention would only harm the Syrian people, citing conflicts in Iraq, Libya and Somalia.
"All these military interventions worsened the position rather than solved the conflict," he said.
International powers, along with the OIC and the Arab League, plan to meet in Tunis on February 24 as part of a newly-created "Friends of Syria Group" to look for a way to peacefully end the conflict in Syria.
"This will throw increasing pressure on the government to talk to the opposition. We need to work out a blueprint for the future transformation of power," he said.