Unarmed United Nations observers looking to monitor Syria's conflict and the latest mass killing have been stifled by heavy weapons, armor-piercing bullets and surveillance drones, UN leader Ban Ki-moon said during a Security Council meeting.

Ban told the UN General Assembly that the monitors "were shot at with small arms" as they tried to reach Mazraat al-Qubair, a farming area in the central Hama province where activists accused government forces of killing nearly 80 people, including women and children who were shot, hacked to death and burned in their homes. The group was denied access. By nightfall, the UN observers had not managed to visit the village, said spokesman Kieran Dwyer.

No observers were injured and it was not clear who was behind the shooting, the UN said.

Inside a closed Security Council meeting, diplomats told AFP that Ban said drones have been monitoring movements of the observers and heavy shelling was used to deter a convoy on a supervision mission.

UN officials say their vehicles are shot at almost every day in Syria, a tactic that Ban says is used to try to divert the observers from areas where the government has been accused of staging attacks.

Ban added that the observers had seen Syrian military convoys approaching villages, but were "ignored" when they tried to prevent their assaults, AFP reports.

The report of the mass killing in Mazraat al-Qubair came just weeks after more than 100 people were killed in one day in a cluster of villages known as Houla in central Homs province, many of them children and women gunned down in their homes. UN investigators blamed pro-government gunmen for at least some of the killings, but the Syrian regime denied responsibility and blamed rebels for the deaths.

The Houla massacre brought international outrage and a coordinated expulsion of Syrian diplomats from world capitals.

International envoy Kofi Annan, who tried to broker a plan to end the crisis, offered a grim assessment of the coming days and weeks in Syria and confirmed for the first time that Syria is not implementing his peace plan

"If things do not change, the future is likely to be one of brutal repression, massacres, sectarian violence, and even all-out civil war," Annan told the General Assembly.

Annan blamed the failure of his peace plan primarily on the Syrian government Thursday and told the divided UN Security Council there must be "consequences" for those obstructing efforts to end the conflict.

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