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Syrian rebels captured the central Syrian city of Hama on Thursday, days after seizing the country's commercial hub, Aleppo, in a lightning offensive against President Bashar al-Assad's forces.

The rebels led by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group launched their offensive a little more than a week ago, just as a ceasefire took hold between Israel and Assad's ally Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Following overnight clashes, the rebels stormed Hama "from several sides" and engaged in street battles with Assad's forces, Britain-based war monitor, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said.

The rebels said they seized Hama's prison and released its inmates. By the afternoon, Assad's forces admitted losing control of the city, strategically located between Aleppo and Assad's seat of power in the capital Damascus.

"Over the past few hours, with the intensification of confrontations between our soldiers and terrorist groups...these groups were able to breach a number of axes in the city and entered it," the army said in a statement, adding units had regrouped outside Hama.

In a video posted online, HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani said his fighters had entered Hama to "cleanse the wound that has endured in Syria for 40 years", referring to a a brutal regime massacre which killed up to 40,000 people in 1982

"I ask God almighty that it be a conquest with no revenge," he added.

The rapid fall of the city came despite shelling and strikes by the Syrian regime and Russian air forces, as reported by state media late Wednesday.

SOHR which relies on a network of sources inside Syria, says 727 people, mostly combatants but also including 111 civilians, have been killed in Syria since the violence erupted last week.

It marks the most intense fighting since 2020 in the civil war sparked by the repression of pro-democracy protests in 2011.