BEIRUT, Lebanon — More than 90 people, including at least 32 children under the age of 10, were killed in a central Syrian village, top United Nations officials said Saturday, accusing the government of perpetrating the “indiscriminate” shelling of civilian neighborhoods.


In one of the worst episodes of carnage since the uprising began 15 months ago, Syrian tanks and artillery pounded Houla, a rebel-controlled village near the restive city of Homs, during the day, opposition groups said, then soldiers and pro-government fighters stormed the village and killed families in their homes late at night.


Amateur videos said to be taken in the aftermath showed row after row of victims, many of them small children with what appeared to be bullet holes in their temples. Other videos showed gruesome shrapnel wounds caused by what activists said was a barrage of shelling that started Friday in response to demonstrations after the weekly prayer service and that continued Saturday.


United Nations monitors visiting the village on Saturday counted at least 92 bodies and found spent tank shells, which they cited as evidence that the Syrian military had violated its part of a truce in firing heavy artillery at civilians. A United Nations statement said the observers confirmed that “artillery and tank shells were fired at a residential neighborhood.”


International officials largely blamed the government.


Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, and Kofi Annan, his predecessor and envoy to Syria, issued a scathing condemnation.


“This appalling and brutal crime involving indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force is a flagrant violation of international law and of the commitments of the Syrian government to cease the use of heavy weapons in population centers and violence in all its forms,” the top United Nations officials said in a statement. They called on Syria to stop using heavy weapons in population centers and for all sides to cease violence.


The White House said the attack was “a vile testament to an illegitimate regime that responds to peaceful political protest with unspeakable and inhuman brutality.”


Gory images posted online — particularly the scene of rows of dead children smeared with blood — prompted an emotional outpouring of antigovernment demonstrations across Syria and calls for sectarian revenge.


Activists said that much of the slaughter had been carried out by pro-government thugs, or “shabiha,” from the area. Houla is a Sunni Muslim town, while three villages around it are mostly Alawite, the religion of President Bashar al-Assad and whose adherents are the core of his security forces. A fourth village is Shiite Muslim.


A man in a black knitted mask who appeared on one YouTube video, for example, said it was time “to prepare for vengeance against this awful sectarian regime.”


The rebel Free Syrian Army, the loose federation of armed militias across the country, issued a statement saying it was no longer committed to the United Nations truce because the plan was merely buying time for the government to kill civilians and destroy cities and villages.


“We won’t allow truce after truce, which prolongs the crisis for years,” the statement said.


The Syrian government blamed “terrorists,” its catchall phrase for the opposition, for killing the civilians.


State television repeatedly broadcast pictures of members of one household who had been massacred, calling the deaths “part of the ugly crimes that the terrorists are committing against the Syrians with the financial support of some Arab states and others.”


SANA, the state-run news agency, said that “armed terrorist groups attacked law-enforcement forces and civilians” in the nearby town of Teldo, which prompted security forces to “intervene and engage the terrorists.”


But the direct accusation from the United Nations, which is monitoring the tattered April 12 cease-fire, rebutted the government’s standard claim that outsiders or their domestic dupes are to blame for the violence.