BEIRUT, Lebanon — The declared four-day holiday truce between the warring factions in Syria ended on Monday much as it had begun — with airstrikes, artillery barrages and other firefights around the country that made a mockery of the cease-fire.

Even to the last moments, citizens caught up in violence held out hope for a brief lull.

“I told myself I should take advantage of this truce to go visit some relatives,” said a woman willing to be identified only by her nickname, Um Samer, 32. Instead, as she described via Skype, a walk down the street from her house in the Damascus suburb of Hajar al-Aswad was interrupted on Monday when a government missile slammed into a minibus about 200 yards away from her.

“I saw kids cut in pieces and a driver with half his body gone,” she said, horrified. “How is it that we don’t have any value? Are we not human like other people?”

That was just one of the attacks Monday in what activists called one of the worst days of air raids against the suburbs of the capital since the uprising began as a peaceful protest movement in March 2011. The strikes against Hajar al-Aswad left at least 10 people dead, 8 of them in a minibus collective taxi, and many wounded, according to the Local Coordinating Committee and other opposition activists.