Fighters with the rebel Free Syrian Army and others helped carry a wounded man to a hospital in Aleppo on Friday.  GENEVA — Syria’s conflict is now driving 5,000 people out of the country each day in an increasingly desperate scramble for safety, the United Nations refugee agency said Friday as it reported a surge in their numbers to nearly 800,000.  “This is a full-on crisis,” Adrian Edwards, a spokesman for the agency, told journalists in Geneva. He said the number of registered Syrian refugees in neighboring countries had risen about 25 percent last month alone.  Another United Nations agency, Unicef, said in a new assessment that Syrian civilians in conflict zones had only one-third the water supplies of pre-crisis levels, with Aleppo, rural Damascus, Deir al-Zour, Homs, Idlib and Raqqa the most severely afflicted.  This week, Unicef began trucking water purification chemicals into Syria, enough for 10 million people, nearly half the population, as the World Health Organization reported outbreaks of hepatitis A and other diseases spread by poor hygiene and limited access to clean water. The French medical aid group Doctors Without Borders, which operates three field hospitals in northern Syria, said this week that leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease, was endemic but going untreated in areas around Aleppo.  “We still need to do much more to reach all those who need help in order to avoid the risk of waterborne diseases spreading,” Youssouf Abdel-Jelil, a Unicef representative in Damascus, said in a statement.  The latest crisis statistics from the United Nations came as Damascus was gripped in the third consecutive day of clashes between insurgents and loyalists to President Bashar al-Assad. Activist groups have described it as the worst violence there in months, but there was no indication that rebel fighters were any closer to gaining control of the capital, which is heavily defended.  The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an anti-Assad group based in Britain with a network of contacts in Syria, reported that at least 50 civilian workers from a defense factory were killed in a bus bombing on Wednesday near the central city of Hama — more than double the toll the group had said earlier. It attributed the delay in reporting the updated number to an inability to get information from the area, which is controlled by the government.  Syria’s state-run news media reported what it described as a terrorist bombing near Hama but did not specify casualties. It is unclear who was responsible for the blast.  Mr. Edwards, in Geneva, said that as of this week, 787,000 Syrians had registered or were waiting to register as refugees in neighboring countries. The total includes 260,943 in Lebanon, the first country to exceed a quarter-million Syrian refugees; 242,649 in Jordan; 177,180 in Turkey; and 84,852 in Iraq. At least 15,000 have sought refuge in Egypt.  The United Nations refugee agency reported in late January that it was registering up to 1,800 refugees a day in Lebanon and was opening new registration centers to cope with the influx. But its latest figures show that the flow of Syrians to Lebanon now exceeds 2,500 a day, and the heavy fighting in and around Damascus, which is only about 15 miles from the Lebanese border, could send the numbers higher.  Lebanon’s mix of religious sects, with their divided loyalties on the Syrian conflict, in some ways makes it the least hospitable destination for the refugees. The Lebanese government has not built camps for the refugees, who have scrambled to find shelter and set off resentment among some Lebanese. A report released on Thursday by Doctors Without Borders warned that major gaps had arisen in assistance for refugees in Lebanon and that their basic humanitarian needs were not being met.  The leader of the main Syrian opposition group, Sheik Ahmad Moaz al-Khatib, who made a surprise offer last week to open a dialogue with Mr. Assad’s government, has given the Syrian president until Sunday to respond. But there is no indication that Mr. Assad will accept the offer from Sheik Khatib, who is viewed by some of his own colleagues as naïve for even having proposed it.  “He did the Syrian regime a favor at this stage because his attitude showed the opposition as standing in a weak position,” Bassam Aldada, political adviser to the Free Syrian Army, the main armed wing of the opposition, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “Simply it was a free and unexpected dose of hope given to the regime.”  Nick Cumming-Bruce reported from Geneva, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Reporting was contributed by Hania Mourtada and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon; Hala Droubi from Dubai, United Arab Emirates; and Karam Shoumali from Antakya, Turkey.
The surge brought the total number of registered refugees this week to 787,000, officials said, with many living in dire conditions without adequate humanitarian support.