UNITED NATIONS - Reacting to new bloodshed in Syria, European powers relaunched a dormant draft UN resolution to condemn Damascus for its crackdown on protesters, circulating a revised text to the Security Council at a meeting on Monday, diplomats said.

Germany requested the closed-door meeting after human rights groups said Syrian troops killed 80 people on Sunday when they stormed the city of Hama to crush protests amid a five-month-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.

The military offensive continued in Hama on Monday, residents said.

The Security Council was briefed on the latest events in Syria by Oscar Fernandez Taranco, deputy head of the UN political department.

Practical council action on Syria, where rights groups say more than 1,600 people have been killed since the uprising began, has so far been paralyzed by disagreements within the 15-nation body.

Critics have said they fear that even a simple condemnation could be the first step toward Western military intervention in Syria, as happened in Libya in March.

Mood changing

But Britain's UN Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant said the mood could be changing following the latest bloodshed in Hama.

Lyall Grant said the Europeans were thinking of calling ambassador-level negotiations on Tuesday on the text. Britain, France, Germany and Portugal are the four Western European countries on the council.

US Ambassador Susan Rice told reporters it was "past time for action" on Syria.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said: "We think it's important that they (the Security Council) send a strong and unified message to Assad and his regime."

Diplomats said the revised version was similar to its predecessor, updated to take in more recent events, and did not call for sanctions against Syria or a referral of Syrian leaders to the International Criminal Court.

South African Ambassador Baso Sangqu described the latest events in Syria as "terrible" but told reporters he could not say what his country's position on the new draft would be until he had studied it.

Sangqu noted that South Africa, Brazil and India planned to jointly send deputy ministers to Damascus "in the near future" to express concerns to Syrian officials over the situation. The planned move has been seen until now by Western diplomats as an alternative to the draft resolution.