The head of the Arab League monitoring mission in Syria has said violence has risen significantly in the country in recent days, as the United Nations prepares to debate a resolution on the crisis next week.

The flashpoint city of Homs has again been the focal point of clashes, which are thought to have killed at least 100 people since Wednesday. Activists in the besieged city reported a massacre had taken place at the hands of regime forces on Thursday.

European and Arab states are frantically drafting a resolution aimed at ending the violence and seizing power from the president, Bashar al-Assad, whose regime had enjoyed absolute control over Syria until a sustained and increasingly violent challenge to its rule.

However, a key member of the U.N. Security Council, Russia, said it would again use its veto to kill any resolution that calls for Assad to stand down. The stance of Moscow, a staunch ally of the Assad regime, appears to end any notion of a short-term solution to the crisis in Syria, where 10 months of violence has killed at least 6,000 people.

The U.N. said on Friday that 384 children had died since the rebellion began last March. Escalating tensions have since pitted an increasingly armed and organized opposition against a loyalist military.

In his most strident comments since the Arab League monitoring mission began in November, its chief, General Mohammed Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi, said: "The situation at present, in terms of violence, does not help prepare the atmosphere … to get all sides to sit at the negotiating table."

He identified Hama, Homs and Idlib as key areas of concern. Parts of the capital, Damascus, are also becoming an active conflict zone, although regime forces remain in control of most of the city and death tolls during clashes are not as high.

Western states have remained reluctant to characterize the increasing violence in Syria as a civil war. Neither Britain, France, nor the US has described the violence in Syria, which is increasingly destabilizing the country and alarming the region, as anything more than a rebellion, or budding insurgency.

"As the U.K., we don't believe it's a civil war at present," said a Foreign Office spokesman. "But the situation is clearly deteriorating steadily, which is why we are pressing for swift action at the U.N. in support of the Arab League."

U.S. legislators have also described the crisis in Syria in ominous tones, without being prepared to offer a clear descriptor. "It is pretty close to a civil war," said John Kerry, U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, this week.

There is little debate in academic circles about whether the situation in Syria now meets the defined benchmarks of civil war. "By the coding rules typically used by political scientists and sociologists who study civil war, yes, the conflict in Syria almost surely qualifies," said Jim Fearon, Stanford University political scientist.

"A fairly typical first cut at a definition for civil war would be 'an armed conflict between organized groups fighting over power at the center or in a region, that has killed at least 1,000 within one year, and at least 100 on both sides.'"

Analysts contacted by the Guardian say the reluctance of governments who are condemning the Syrian regime to accept that the term civil war applies there is driven by three factors: domestic political considerations, a fear that the term would exacerbate the situation, and out of concern to avoid making a moral judgement that could legitimize either side.

"People use the definition in a morally loaded way," said Shashank Joshi, an associate fellow of the Royal United Services Institute in London. "It can propel sides into action. It has connotations about the actors involved. It's much better for [governments] if they can continue to call the other side rebels because you can then characterize the conflict as rebels versus a dictatorship.

"If you call it a civil war, it gives the [Syrian] government license to treat it as a civil war. And that is a license you don't want to give them. We need to recognize that there is still a peaceful process taking place alongside the violence. Western governments are still holding out some hope that they can make political gains without violence."

In a potentially significant development, the secretary general of the Gulf Co-operation Council, which this week withdrew its monitors from the Arab League monitoring mission to Syria, will on Monday meet NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen at the organization's headquarters.

Intellpuke: You can read this article by Guardian Middle East correspondent Martin Chulov, reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, in context here: www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/27/syria-violence-arab-league